Hillbilly Elegy Is Terrible Award Bait, Bless Its Heart
Photos Courtesy of Lacey Terrell/Netflix
Hillbilly Elegy wears me the hell out. Without reading the source material, it’s hard to say if screenwriter Vanessa Taylor’s adaptation of J.D. Vance’s bootstrap-yanking memoir turns the jumble of adolescent Appalachian upbringing and Hollywood shorthand into a flat, scattered, and trite narrative or if it’s doing it backhanded justice. The story of J.D.’s imperfect childhood and Ivy League aspirations—forced back together by his mother’s heroin overdose (when he has a big interview coming up too!) after his initial escape to Yale—comes decorated in poverty cosplay and wielding a misguided sense of superiority.
Muddled and dull, cutting back and forth haphazardly across two timelines, Hillbilly Elegy tries to convey the hardship faced by J.D. and his family while patting him on the back for not letting them drag him down. It portrays an unreasonable world run by uncooperative doctors and lawyers, while ogling its disapproving camera on any person that looks like they might make less than six figures. It proudly stumps for Real America and its values (“hill people” have respect, J.D.’s Mamaw notes, unlike SOME people) while filming them like it’s visiting a zoo.
Hypocritical in both its overarching themes and its line-by-line dialogue, director Ron Howard’s film feels false from the jump. When a movie called Hillbilly Elegy gets mad at someone referring to “rednecks,” both Jeff Foxworthy and all the joke-filled Facebook pages my Arkansas relatives follow are gonna call bullshit. The movie can’t quite figure out who it hates. Is it the urbanites that don’t know the joys of a fried bologna sandwich? Or is it the yokels it deems too stupid, unambitious, or drug-addled to leave them behind? The result is a gray, aimlessly shambling, Oscar-hungry monster cobbled together by a mad scientist wearing fake “Billy Bob” teeth.
The awards thirst is palpable from the swelling string score to the closing based-on-a-true-story photo montage—not to mention the casting that didn’t even seem to refer to the script. Glenn Close’s Mamaw is supposed to be just 13 years older than Amy Adams’ Bev? Really? Both tragically bewigged performers go big in roles almost parodically perfect for the perennial Oscar hopefuls, always reminding us that yes, it really is them in those Walmart T-shirts. Adams is unhinged in a sad way, while Close stretches actorly affectations as thin as the wisdom she’s asked to dispense. Her aphorisms and exclamations are just the absurd starting point for a character with more constipated grimaces than personality. At least Gabriel Basso’s cardboard J.D. looks a lot like Owen Asztalos, who plays his younger self with a tiny bit more life.
As the central, self-centered, self-loathing, defensive hero, J.D. is lifeless as an adult and one-note as a kid. Banality treated as exceptional is how this film operates. Young J.D. can spout football stats and he likes watching the news, which signals he’s got the ability to escape suburban Ohio. He can decide to be somebody, as Mamaw puts it. Similarly, the film treats such things as watching Terminator 2 on TV or struggling to pay a medical bill as worthy enough moments to get the set piece treatment.