EAT • SLEEP • REVIEW • REPEAT
HILLBILLY ELEGY
Silly billy.
I think it’s pretty fair to say that Hollywood’s relationship with poverty has been a rough one. If the poor aren’t being used as punching bags or punchlines, they’re sideshow curios or the subject of condescending chin-stroking. Of course, there are exceptions, yet Hollywood’s approach to poverty has so often been misguided.
It makes total sense then that we would eventually get a star-studded, Oscar-baiting adaptation of J.D. Vance’s best-selling up-by-the-bootstraps memoir, ‘Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis’. With the MAGA movement in full swing and everyone fumbling around to unearth the source of Donald Trump’s appeal, Vance’s book was the talk of the town back in 2016, yet it was widely derided for its damaging rhetoric and flawed approach to white working class America. Kind of perfect for the Hollywood treatment then, eh?
Fast forward four years and (oddly enough) just as the MAGA world the book dissected teeters on the verge of implosion, along comes a Netflix adaptation that applies some serious star-power to its source material, however, if you’ve set eyes on the film’s absurd poster, the flawed results will come as little surprise.
When his mother, Bev (Amy Adams), is admitted to hospital following a heroin overdose, Yale Law student J.D. (Gabriel Basso) is drawn back to his Appalachian hometown to take care of her. As he struggles to deal with the situation, J.D. reflects on their strained relationship, his family’s turbulent history, the unconventional love of his grandmother (Glenn Close), as well as his own future, as he must decide what his next move will be.
The moment that bizarre poster of Amy Adams and Glenn Close looking like they’re heading to a hillbilly-themed Halloween party arrived, we were told everything we needed to be told about where this film was heading. Desperately putting itself forward as something worthy of the Academy’s attention, yet coming off like an over-ripe ‘Movie of the Week’, Hillbilly Elegy is a confused mess that will seriously struggle to connect with any of its intended target audiences.
As Hollywood’s king of sentimentality, Ron Howard feels like an odd fit for Vance’s down-and-dirty story, and so it turns out, as the uneven tone falls somewhere awkwardly between hard-hitting social drama and the director’s valiant against-the-odds comfort zone. Admirably, Howard and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor manage to soften the book’s coarse Republican edge, yet, in doing so, the streamlined story often disintegrates into overly mawkish melodrama.
While the film isn’t quite as bad as the overwhelmingly negative hype suggests, neither is it in any way a good film. Unsurprisingly, both Amy Adams and Glenn Close are a pleasure to watch as they both attempt to out act one another, breathing life into the film whenever they’re on screen (especially together, which is a surprisingly rare occurrence), going a fair way to avoid the all-out car crash Hillbilly Elegy threatens.
However, despite the inimitable presence of these two acting greats, Hillbilly Elegy consistently undermines itself with some truly awful writing. In scandalously sacrificing Adams and Close’s collective screen time and any substantial examination of the warped relationship between Bev and Bonnie, we are obliged to spend a not insignificant amount of time with adult J.D. who is, quite frankly, duller than dishwater.
Dealt a bum hand by some uninspired and painfully cliched dialogue, Gabriel Basso nonetheless fails to add any dimension to J.D., as his race-against-time plot – in which he must deal with his drug addict mother before rushing back to interview for a job that will make him rich and successful (yep, seriously) – fails to make any real emotional impact. To this end, Ron Howard fails to bring these modern-day scenes to life, wrapping a questionable message and uninspired melodrama around a clunky and highly questionable plot device.
More success is found in the flashback scenes that, thanks to the combined power of Adams and Close, and helped along by Hans Zimmer and David Fleming’s wonderfully stirring score (which feels consistently underserved by such an inert film), deliver far more of an impact. These scenes do their job adequately, however, due to this being J.D.’s story from beginning to end, all the good work is undermined by narcissism and self-righteousness.
As one might expect, everything is shot through J.D.’s eyes, leaving all ancillary characters with little agency within the story beyond serving the protagonist’s journey. The long-suffering son angle rapidly grates, as Basso struggles to offer us any real reason to root for his character, leaving behind a thoroughly hollow viewing experience.
In taking the edge off the Republicanisms of Vance’s book, Howard manages to take the sting out of Hillbilly Elegy’s politics, however, the film’s deeply conservative message is unavoidable. At every turn it suggests that poverty is all in the mind, consistently looking down its nose at the fecklessness of the impoverished. If only the poor folk everywhere would just roll their sleeves up and put a little effort into it, they might just be as rich and successful as J.D. Vance. Sigh.
Setting itself up as Oscar-bait but coming off like a Hallmark-level melodrama, Hillbilly Elegy is a massive waste of both the potential of its subject matter and the imperious talents of its stars. Fumbling the ball as he dithers on whether to aim for a hard-hitting drama or the by-the-bootstraps journey that he’s far more comfortable with, Ron Howard ends up caught in no-man’s-land, as terrible writing, a chronic lack of focus, and a highly questionable message let the film down. While it’s not quite the car crash some may have expected, there really is little about Hillbilly Elegy to justify its Oscar-worthy assertions.
