ALSO SHOWING
Hillbilly Elegy ( 12a)
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Ron Howard’s latest is a sincere if somewhat soft- edged attempt to understand America’s disenfranchised white working classes. Adapting a best- selling 2016 memoir by ex- marine- turnedlaw- student- turned- venturecapitalist JD Vance, it takes Vance’s self- mythologising story of pulling himself up by his bootstraps ( with a little help from his Appalachian grandmother) and delivers a film that reinforces the Horatio Alger- inspired myth that anyone can be successful in America through sheer hard work. Cutting back- and- forth between Vance’s precarious childhood and his race- against- time efforts to attend an important job interview while also simultaneously trying to get his relapsing mother ( Amy Adams) into a drug rehabilitation facility, the film’s well- intentioned attempt to humanise Vance’s raucous relatives drains any life out of the story by sentimentalising their hardship. Which seems like an odd thing to say about a movie that features Amy Adams as Vance’s drug- addicted mother shooting heroin into her legs or beating the young JD for not defending her to his friends ( JD is played as a kid by Owen Asztalos and as an adult by Gabriel Basso).
But for all Adams’s range and proven ability to play this kind of character, Howard’s respectful but overly cautious approach to the material doesn’t let her performance come convincingly alive. The same goes for Glenn Close. Playing JD’S "Mawmaw" beneath a thick layer of prosthetics and a tight granny perm, she might excite Oscar watchers who can’t see beyond a physical transformation, but her work here feels like showy act of mimicry, not the sort of lived- in performance that might have helped this feel like a genuine slice- of- life look at a much misunderstood side of America. File under “missed opportunity.” Hillbilly Elegy is in select cinemas in Scotland now, and streaming on Netflix from 24 November
Billie ( 15)
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The tough, tragic, remarkable life of jazz legend Billie Holiday is vividly recounted in this documentary, which draws on 200 hours of neverbefore- heard audio interviews with bandmates, family members, friends and musical contemporaries who witnessed her tumultuous career up close.
Conducted in the 1970s for a neverfinished biography, the interviews ( which include astonishing testimony from the likes of Count Baisie, Sylvia Syms, Charles Mingus and her producer John Hammond) present a raw and unvarnished portrait of a complicated, vivacious artist who has too often been portrayed as a victim or sentimentally packaged to appeal to mainstream audiences.
Containing stories of tremendous hardship and abuse as well as tremendous resilience and defiance, these candid interviews certainly answer the question posed somewhat naively in the film by celebrity fan and acquaintance Tony Bennett: why did Holiday “crack up” after hitting the top. But the tapes also generate a mystery of their own. Holiday’s would- be biographer, Linda Lipnack Kuehl, spent the best part of a decade gathering these accounts, but was found dead on a street in Washington, DC in 1978 in somewhat suspicious circumstances.
Director James Erskine doesn’t make the mistake of giving the stories equal weight here; instead he’s smart enough to let the material directly and obliquely address the issue of who has the right to tell what story. He also has one big advantage over Kuehl: he’s able to feature Holiday’s voice and the chance to hear it in a film that contextualises everything she went through makes this a valuable endeavour.