I can’t help but speculate that it’s not a coincidence both Amy Adams and Glenn Close, actresses long courted by the Academy, but never recipients of any prize (yes, Glenn Close has never won an Oscar!), signed on to a movie like Hillbilly Elegy. It’s perfect awards season bait, a film based on a bestselling memoir, directed by the Oscar-winning Ron Howard, and offering both actresses the opportunity show off their range as larger than life characters in a very unsophisticated (i.e. transformative) context. It’s the kind of thing that has paid off for other actors before, so I get why they’re in it. But that doesn’t make it any less sad to see them.
Hillbilly Elegy is a bad movie, and it’s not very surprising that it’s a bad movie. The book its’ based on by J.D. Vance is supposedly an autobiographical chronicle of a childhood in rural Kentucky, coloured by family dysfunction and “Appalachian values” mixed in with social commentary on the state of white poverty in the United States. Naturally it’s mostly the life story side that Ron Howard and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor adapted for their film, though bits of Vance’s personal outlook and opinions do still find their way in, often in very flat, hackneyed ways through the mouthpieces of his grandmother Mamaw (Close) or sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett) espousing his virtues of tough love and self-determinism.
The film plays out J.D.’s past and present stories simultaneously, in a manner akin to Little Women, though without its’ smoothness, thematic cohesion, or basic competence. The transitions between narratives are really rough in places, there is almost nothing that connects the memories to the present storyline. Which is a shame because it’s a structure I really love in a good movie (see again, Little Women). But Howard doesn’t want to use that device to its fullest potential, rarely complimenting a scene’s counterpart and cutting back and forth at random most of the time. It also hurts the dichotomy of the two stories that they each have different stakes: the modern one is not nearly as urgent as it makes itself out to be and the drama not in any way compelling. The flashbacks aren’t either, but they are flooded with material that demands your attention and have a level of direction to them, in addition to much more virulent action.
Of course everything in the flashbacks has the air of contrivance to it, despite being apparently based on real people, real environments and real experiences. Perhaps this too is owing to the way these episodes are told, always from J.D.’s perspective and thus with a strict moral judgment applied; but it could also be the choice just to dwell in stereotypes and the absolute worst impressions one could draw from such people while still romanticizing their background. It’s an extremely jarring mix of messages. To be clear, contradictory themes regarding love for a specific culture and disparagement of the societal ills of that culture can be blended well -a great recent example being The Last Black Man in San Francisco. But Hillbilly Elegy never justifies the reverence J.D. seems to hold for what by all accounts was a horrible upbringing, as much as he may venerate the unseen noble virtues to particularly his mothers’ character in retrospect.
And that’s one of the movies’ biggest sins, its’ complete failure to generate sympathy for Beverly Vance, a grossly irresponsible and unhinged heroin addict constantly lashing out at and putting the lives of her kids in jeopardy. Repeatedly she engages in self-destructive behaviour, makes reckless decisions, and abuses her kids, while continually relapsing and apparently never trying to get better. This is the point on some level, Vance’s belief in personal responsibility to bypass the struggles of poverty over a system of institutional suppression informs the story greatly, and is by far its’ most glaring blind spot in the way it tackles its’ portrait of a rural “white middle class”. But at the same time, the blame for Bev’s problems will be lain on inherited trauma and the issues of her own parents, seemingly acknowledging a cycle perpetuated by conditions. Perhaps most importantly though, we never see the woman who J.D. would call the smartest person he knows in front of a table of high-end lawyers. We get no impression of who she was outside of all the drugs and abuse, if she ever existed apart from that and J.D.’s assertion has any validity. If she was at some point a good mother, why doesn’t J.D. ever recollect those instances? Even a montage in the climax can’t help but revisit some of her worst moments.
Entrenched in the misery of this figure is Amy Adams giving honestly one of the more awkward performances of her career. She is trying so hard through age make-up and an overwhelming accent, but the writing does not support her and it doesn’t ever feel genuine. You’re always aware it’s a performance more than a person. This is doubly the case for Glenn Close, who fares better if only because she gets to be funny on occasion, albeit usually not intentionally. Mamaw is an absolute caricature of a hillbilly stereotype, a twenty-first century chain-smoking Granny Clampett, with her harsh demeanour, eccentric fashion, crass manner, and casual racism. We’re meant to connect with her as well on an emotional level, but she also is much too artificial. While Haley Bennett plays Lindsay across a span of more than a decade, J.D. is split between a child and adult actor –though even the former, Owen Asztalos, is at once both too old and too young as he seems to be playing at least four years of adolescence across the film. It’s no surprise he struggles. Gabriel Basso is only slightly better as the adult, hampered much like Adams by some truly awful writing. Even Frieda Pinto can’t quite deliver an adequate performance as J.D.’s thinly drawn college girlfriend.
By the end of Hillbilly Elegy, it’s clear that J.D. has normalized certain aspects of his youth that should not be normalized. And neither he nor Howard nor anyone involved in the film seems aware of this. But Howard at least knows how to dress up this insidiousness and cloud it in an image of a noble character arc. And I’m sure that would appeal to Vance, the whole movie plays like a vanity project where he’s always the just, outspoken voice of reason. In reality though, Hillbilly Elegy depicts a tragic, deeply dysfunctional family without ever maturely reckoning with the root causes of their misfortunes; mostly content instead to wallow in the depressive chapters of their lives and reassure us that what’s most important is that J.D. escaped it through simply deciding not to do drugs or whatever. But also that their way of life is still somehow good and natural. It’s extremely shallow, thematically toothless, narratively pointless, and probably does not represent actual white middle class Appalachians very honestly. A Hillbilly Eulogy would be more appropriate.
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