‘ Hillbilly Elegy’ trash has Adams’ treasure
“Hillbilly Elegy,” the Netflix adaptation of J. D. Vance’s 2016 bestselling memoir, has brought Amy Adams the first controversy of her stellar acting career. Reviews have accused her of everything from the most naked Oscar grab since Leonardo DiCaprio fought a bear to helping typecast a region.
Adams’ weight gain, frizzedhair makeunder and largely belligerent performance as J. D.’ s neglectful mother, Bev, do seem to add up to an Appalachian Mountainsize attempt to win the Oscar that has eluded her despite six nominations. But the idea that Adams suddenly went country to mine regional cliches is off base.
Adams, who grew up in Colorado, received her first Oscar nomination for her astonishing performance as a determinedly upbeat North Carolinian in 2005’ s “Junebug.” Her best performance after that was as a PTSDsuffering St. Louis reporter who returns to her small Missouri hometown in the 2018 HBO limited series “Sharp Objects.”
In those projects, Adams did not wallow in the holler but crafted characters who were believable products of their small towns. Together with Bev in “Elegy,” these characters form an Adams hillbilly trilogy that offers insight into what makes her one of Hollywood’s finest talents, and into the limits of her range.
The Cracker Barrel in
human form: In “Junebug,” Adams plays Ashley, a very pregnant young woman who lives with the family of her husband ( Ben McKenzie). Ashley is enamored with her brotherinlaw’s sophisticated new wife, Madeleine ( Embeth Davidtz), owner of a Chicago “outsider” art gallery. Madeleine and her husband ( Alessandro Nivola) are in town to woo a local folk artist.
Ashley peppers Madeleine with questions about her education and upbringing. When Madeleine answers that she was born in Japan, Ashley responds, “you were not,” with Adams, in closeup, imparting genuine amazement.
The lovable Ashley embodies the Southern smalltown hospitality we all hear about. She is the Cracker Barrel in human form. The rest of the family is more guarded around the bigcity sisterinlaw, the men taciturn in that way that “Cool Hand Luke,” “Deliverance” and a hundred other movies and Mitch McConnells have taught us is just a few beats away from meanness.
“Junebug” rips that BandAid of audience expectation right off by having the folk artist spew racial epithets and sexually inappropriate comments while describing his art. He also might be mentally ill, and perhaps he is being exploited by the dealers vying for his work.
Every character in “Junebug” is complex, but none more so than Adams’ Ashley, whose positive spin on life is part
nature and part strategy to get her surly husband to care about her again. Ashley’s sadness, obscured for much of the film by Adams’ crack comic timing and good cheer, devastates when it finally emerges.
With “Junebug,” and her whimsical portrayal of a displaced animated princess in 2007’ s “Enchanted,” Adams cemented her status as a thorough delight, and established her moviestar baseline as relatable and accessible.
Blame it on the tyranny of the upturned nose, but Adams is not cut out to play villains.
She radiates old wounds:
Three years after “Junebug,” Adams already could hold her own among titans. She outacted Meryl Streep in the 2008 priestmolestation drama “Doubt,” in which Adams played a wideeyed nun opposite Streep’s more seasoned sister. Both received Oscar nominations, along with costars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Viola Davis.
But “Doubt” also marked the final time she could play naive without being typecast as a rube ( in the innocent, nonregional sense). And she has not been typecast, because she kept testing and even furthering her range.
Adams was believable, and great, two years later as a tough Boston barmaid in David O. Russell’s “The Fighter”; as a glamorous con artist in Russell’s “American Hustle,” and as a helmethaired, Lady Macbethinfluenced Lynne Cheney in “Vice.” She has shown far more guile onscreen than seemed possible from her turn in “Junebug.”
She also steadied her trademark vivid expressions, allowing the camera to observe her stillness and soulfulness, when she played an alien whisperer in “Arrival,” and a bigcity art gallery owner ( full circle!) in “Nocturnal Animals.”
Adams’ naturally sympathetic screen presence and move toward more interior performances dovetailed beautifully in “Sharp Objects.” Based on a novel by Gillian Flynn, the series pitted Adams’ weary reporter character, Camille, against her hypercritical but wellturnedout mother ( a witheringly genteel Patricia Clarkson).
Camille associates her hometown, to which she has returned to report on the murders of two girls, with childhood trauma caused by her mother and others. In her youth, Camille reacted to trauma by carving words into her skin, seeking relief and a scartissue barrier from the outside world. As an adult, she pursues impermeability by drinking all day.
Adams’ acting in “Sharp Objects” is exceptionally subtle, but she radiates such pain throughout that your heart just breaks for Camille.
Adams at her worst:
In the 15 years since “Junebug,” Adams has kept switching it up while remaining reliably wonderful. Until “Elegy,” in which she gives ( what we hope will be) her worst performance.
The trouble starts with the script. Screenwriter Vanessa Taylor and director Ron Howard stripped much of the sociopolitical context from venture capitalist Vance’s memoir, in which he chided his Appalachianrooted brethren for not pulling themselves out of poverty like he did. What remains is an overly familiar tale of a troubled mother with a drug problem and the grandmother ( Glenn Close) who intervenes.
“Elegy” simplifies things further by presenting Close’s Mamaw as
J. D.’ s savior, and Bev as the only obstacle to his success. The central motherdaughter struggle that made “Objects” so compelling goes missing here, with the film barely touching on the generational trauma enveloping both characters.
Close, too, has been accused of swinging for the fences in “Elegy.” But she’s good, even commanding, as a woman determined to raise her grandson right. She also has more to work with than Adams, since every scene of real emotional substance happens between Mamaw and J. D.
This Adams country character is not like Ashley, who combats unpleasantness with sunniness, or Camille, who finds other ways to stave off problems. Bev is the problem in “Elegy.” She’s the screaming, crying bogeywoman of the piece, who loudly claims victimhood instead of acknowledging the damage she has done.
Bev rifles through men, and loses her job as a nurse after donning roller skates for a joyride, under the influence, through the hospital hallways. She’s that woman who’s too old for “bad girl” behavior but can’t stop now because it once was reinforced, because someone found her adorable or sexy. Such a role requires the kind of slowroll, birdflipping impertinence Jessica Lange could summon in her sleep. Either that, or an actress who looks like she’s lived a life, like one of the women who played Mark Wahlberg’s sisters from “The Fighter.”
But despite being deglamorized, Adams is still mostly freshfaced in “Elegy,” and despite her capacity for projecting characters’ interior lives, her performance here is often pantomimed, creating the first caricature of all her roles, country or not.
More simply, Adams was miscast, as an antagonist in general and more specifically as this one. The problem with actors reaching Adams’ level is not just that they might choose roles out of Oscar thirst, but that directors cast them based on reputation rather than suitability.
Adams, like all the greats, can’t do everything. Only most things.