Sentimental take on a hit misery memoir
Hillbilly Elegy (117 min) ★★ ★★★
Dir Ron Howard
Starring Amy Adams, Glenn Close, Gabriel Basso, Haley Bennett, Freida Pinto, Bo Hopkins, Owen Asztalos
Hillbilly Elegy started life as a non-fiction bestseller – brace yourselves. Published in 2016 and subtitled “a memoir of a family and a culture in crisis”, it delved into the Kentucky and Ohio upbringing of JD Vance, a Yale law graduate turned venture capitalist. Having lifted himself up from a hellish childhood marked by his ma’s drug addiction and violent abuse, Vance aimed to trumpet his understanding of that sector of poor, white, working-class America who were coming out in droves to vote for Trump – and then found his book seized upon as a kind of MAGA-FORdummies sociological explainer.
How his achievement squares with the film now before us, directed by touchy-feely Ron Howard as a showcase for two multiple-oscarnominated actresses who haven’t won yet, is a question for the ages. It’s a bizarre case of square peg, round hole.
Vance is played as a doughy 13-yearold by Owen Asztalos, and then as an edgy, overburdened law-school outsider by Gabriel Basso 14 years later. Most of the film’s present-tense tale unfolds, in ways so dramatically convenient you feel stitched up to the eyeballs, over a single 24 hours.
While JD is awaiting callback for a crucial interview at Yale, he’s urgently summoned home by his sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett) to their mother’s side in Middleton, Ohio, where she has relapsed and been admitted to hospital for heroin addiction.
This is not our first glimpse of Amy Adams as tragic Bev, nor of Glenn Close in the indomitable role of her mother, Mamaw, who goes by no other name. We’ve already got the measure of these two in a prologue. Both are hefty broads you wouldn’t want to meddle with, busy stomping around the porch firing off quips.
Close is ferociously committed, in an all-stops-out sort of way, but she’s just so encrusted – with her electrified wire-wool hair and mottled red complexion, it’s a victory in Best Make-up waiting to happen.
Her huge, upside-down rose specs are straight from the cabinet of the snooker player Dennis Taylor. Forever puckering in her lips and cheeks as if worry has switched on an internal suction fan, Mamaw, undoubtedly, has lived a life.
Adams, meanwhile, weirdly lacks room to breathe in her part, or the screen time to make genuine sense of Bev.
Even at its most stolid, the film is a weird object because of Howard’s liberal sentimentality.
He and his cast try to deliver a sympathetic message about the importance of family, but the family in question is so gruesome your sympathies instead lie with JD’S decision to run away with all his might from his roots.
Elegy is four years late and doomed. Available on Netflix from Nov 24