In the American ruling and media classes’ long campaign to understand—and, it must be said, leverage—the white working class of this country, they have found many symbols and talismans to cling to. There was Joe the Plumber, trotted out to speak for the silent Real America against Barack Obama. There have been countless articles from big newspapers documenting, over and over again, the political tempers of struggling, Trump-supporting Rust Belt towns. (While often ignoring racism and xenophobia.) And there was Hillbilly Elegy, a whole book written about this maligned demographic, seized by the opioid crisis and an existential hopelessness fueled by fading industry and minimal cultural attention.
The memoir, written by venture capitalist lawyer J.D. Vance, was a sensation in 2016, apparently offering some timely clarity about Trumpism’s success in certain parts of the country, showing that it was born not out of animus but of desperation; it was a great clamoring to be heard. Vance, a child of southwest Ohio who spent his summers in Kentucky, is a Yale Law graduate, an eloquent speaker, polished and media-ready. And yet, he is also rooted in the small-town, Middle-American values that so many people on the coasts, the thinking goes, just don’t understand. It was probably inevitable that this digestibly and deceptively narrow book would be turned into a movie, and perhaps even more inevitable that that film would be such a Hollywood grotesque.
Whatever one thinks of Vance’s politics, the main narrative of his book (if not his broader sociopolitical conclusions) is lived experience worthy of fair treatment: young Vance’s sense of displacement as he bounced between living situations as a teenager, his mother’s drug addiction, his grandmother’s steely resolve even as she confronted her own troubled past. There is plenty there to carefully mine, to tease into cinematic drama that may not encapsulate a vast and disparate swath of people, but could at least tell one family’s story with specific nuance and compassion. Movies do this kind of extrapolation all the time, isolating the vital heart and ignoring the trickier stuff that surrounds it.
What the film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy (in theaters November 11, on Netflix November 24) does instead is ignore the bigger politics and this family’s particular humanity. Director Ron Howard, working with Vanessa Taylor’s script, comes parachuting in with two major actors twirling after him, and makes a useless hash of the whole thing. Hillbilly Elegy is both witless cosplay and a failure to interrogate any of the book’s controversial insinuations. I can’t imagine the film will satisfy those who agree with Vance or those who want to tangle with him—let alone those just looking for an engrossing family saga.
Hillbilly Elegy follows a mess of different timelines: young J.D. in the relatively idyllic earlier years of his childhood; teen J.D. struggling with his crumbling family life; older J.D. trying to break free of the family cycle by succeeding at Yale and landing a big job in Washington D.C., but finding himself caught in his mother’s undertow. These threads tangle and clump as the film plods along, one shouty scene stumbling into another. We learn that J.D. is steadfast and principled after an erratic youth. We learn that his mother, Bev, is a smart and ambitious person derailed by addiction. His grandmother, Mamaw, is a tough cookie who didn’t protect her daughter when she was young and is determined to correct that with her grandson. We could get all this from reading the back of the book, essentially, and yet the film uses none of its two-hour runtime to flesh out anything beyond those basic sketches.
Like the worst kind of memoir adaptation, every scene in Hillbilly Elegy is an Event. The Day of the Fight, the Day of the Arrest, the Day of the Bad Dinner with the Snooty Lawyer Who Mocks J.D.’s Upbringing. That last scene also happens to be the same day J.D. finds out that his mother has relapsed and is in the hospital. The film leaves pretty much zero room for anything quotidian, anything usual, which might give the story some kind of subtle human texture, and make the dramatic stuff actually land with the intended impact. It’s all yelling all the time, an exhausting litany of bad moments that renders the family’s story just about meaningless.
It’s aesthetically dull, too. There is no visual poetry to be found. Hans Zimmer and David Fleming’s score does its required emotional indicating, but never stokes any real sentiment. Howard has made a terminally bland movie, forsaking style (and, really, substance) because it figures the film’s noble act of translation is enough. Hillbilly Elegy probably would have won a bunch of Emmys in the late 1990s.
People unfamiliar with Vance’s book probably aren’t coming to the movie for technique, though. The big draw—beyond the book’s popularity, of course—is Hillbilly Elegy’s two star performers. Amy Adams plays Bev, while Glenn Close hams it up as Mawmaw. By now you’ve probably seen them on the posters and in the trailer, these two A-listers dirtied up to play regular folk. I’ll give Adams and Close the tentative benefit of the doubt and assume they didn’t just do this for Oscar attention.
Adams, as ever, gives it her best. She does manage to convince in some scenes, locating the fright and shame in Bev’s self-destruction. Adams has a keen command of Bev’s mercurial moods, swinging from tender to terrorizing in a second. But she can only fend off the film’s stale, melodramatic characterization so much; she, like everything else, gets dragged into pat, reductive psychology.
I can’t really find much good to say about Close’s performance, except that when the film shows pictures of the real Mamaw during the closing credits, you realize that they did do a pretty good job of turning Close into a lookalike. Otherwise, Close’s work in the film is almost an obscenity, a patrician actor doing the hoariest of brassy-old-lady drag. It’s a kind of mugging that has no place in an age when audiences have become much better attuned to Hollywood falseness than they once were. Every note of Close’s performance is a glaring actor choice, all grim calculation masked as empathy.
Adult J.D. is played by Gabriel Basso, an actor best known for the Showtime series The Big C, who flattens himself here into a cardboard cutout of an intrepid class transcender. Though politics has mostly been eschewed in this adaptation, a sour thematic note does gradually develop throughout the film, as J.D. grows up and tries his damnedest to shake off his family’s clawing need. The film sometimes plays as a solemn, sorry story of a special young man trying to escape the disastrous women in his life—dizzy and small-minded people limited by their lack of reason and rationality and order. The movie says otherwise in its dialogue, but there’s still a creep of judgment snaking around Bev and Mamaw and his sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett, the only performer in the film who operates on a note of quiet dignity) as J.D. regards them with increasing disgust.
Perhaps that is intentional. Many adolescents experience a similar revulsion toward their own families, only to soften as they get older and realize the limits of absolutism. But fostering a complicated moral dimension like that would require Hillbilly Elegy to actually think, and this movie is uneager to do that—or for us to do so. It wants only to barrage us into a reverent stupor, in which we rotely congratulate the bravery of its movie stars and applaud a man who had the fortitude to skip the squalid plane of his childhood and go work for Peter Thiel. (The Thiel connection is never mentioned in the film, nor are some other gnarly true-life details.) This is prestige bait that uses an awfully rusty lure, tossed with careless pride from its ship of Hollywood fools.
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