A ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ adaptation, hold the politics
J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” an election-year explainer to liberal America about the white underclass that fueled Donald Trump’s rise, has been reborn as blandly overbaked awards bait.
Ron Howard’s adaptation, penned by Vanessa Taylor, has mostly done away with the moralizing social examination that made Vance’s best-seller such a lightning rod. The 2016 book came at the moment many were searching for explanations for the political shift taking place across Appalachia and the Rust Belt. “Hillbilly Elegy,” a pick-yourself-upby-your-bootstraps cultural critique-slash-tribute to the author’s Ohio-Kentucky heritage, emerged as one of the trendiest answers.
Vance wrote of “learned helplessness“and “something almost spiritual about the cynicism of the community at large,” but Howard’s film leans into the colorful and difficult characters of Vance’s family for a neater redemption arc. This “Hillbilly Elegy” has stripped away the most sermonizing, debatable parts of the book, but it’s also denuded it of any deeper purpose, leaving us with a cosplay shell of A-list actors chewing rural scenery.
Howard’s “Hillbilly Elegy” is well-meaning. But it teeters constantly on the edge of parody, never slowing down enough to let its characters – a shouty, melodramatic bunch fighting through a chaotic world of poverty, addiction and abuse – come through as much more than caricature.
It’s a jumble of timelines but the basic shape of “Hillbilly Elegy” is a reluctant homecoming. J.D. Vance (Gabriel Basso as an adult, Owen Asztalos as a kid) gets a call from his sister (Haley Bennett) that their mother Bev (Amy Adams) has overdosed. Leaving his girlfriend (Freida Pinto), he drives home from Yale Law School when he’s on the cusp of a major job interview to the decaying steel down of Middletown, Ohio. The trip forces him to reckon with his roots.
Some memories are better than others. Anything with grandma, for starters,
is something to behold. That’s because Glenn Close, buried under prosthetics, is the crochety, foul-mouthed Mamaw. Close’s performance is over-the-top but there’s grit and strength in it.
It’s harder to find something to hold onto in Adams’ performance. Her character is such a loud, grating mess of fury, pain and addiction that Adams struggles to make her coherent.
And by taking politics out of “Hillbilly Elegy,” the movie has unwittingly put some back in. Instead of a tale emerging from a seldom listened-to corner of the world, Howard’s film has reversed course. Hollywood rushes in, wigs in tow.