A ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Review

Hillbilly Elegy is Oscar bait of the highest order. An adaptation of a widely read novel about an oft forgotten subsection of people, and like most Oscar bait, it doesn’t reach the mark, though Hillbilly Elegy’s issues extend far beyond the merits of the film.

I want to go ahead and state the obvious: I am not from Appalachia. I am from the south. I grew up in a small beach town on the southeastern coast of Georgia. I lived there till I was 18 and since have lived in Texas and Louisiana. My parents are not from Appalachia. My extended family, however, is where my connection to this incredible and misrepresented region of the United States, comes in. My namesakes, the Harrison’s, hail from the great state of West by God Virginia (my father would disown me if I didn’t remind everyone that God loves West Virginia more than any other state because His name is in the title). I love and cherish Appalachia, but it’s imperative I state these facts because my view of J.D. Vance and his novel comes from someone who has experience with this region of the country, but is not a son of Appalachia. All that being said, the point in writing this review is not to dissect my family heritage, but to discuss the merits of this film. The rub is, there’s not much merit to be found here.

Hillbilly Elegy is a Ron Howard adaptation of the novel of the same name written by J.D. Vance, detailing his life growing up in southwestern Ohio with his dysfunctional family and visiting kin in Kentucky. The film’s central framing device is J.D. visiting his hometown of Middletown, OH to take care of his mother who has recently overdosed while having flashbacks of his upbringing and his relationship with his grandmother. The novel spends more time making a declarative statement on the state of Appalachia and why the region continues to suffer, using Vance’s personal experience as some sort of generalization as to why two and a half million people live in poverty in a dying part of the country. These personal anecdotes are largely removed from the film and replaced with the Japanese A5 Wagyu equivalent of Oscar Bait. Gabriel Basso takes on the role of J.D. Vance, but frankly he is meant to be a stand in, an audience avatar to respond in all of the ways one could expect when dealing with drug addiction, domestic violence, and abject poverty. I do want to go ahead and say that I enjoyed Haley Bennett in this film as Lindsay. She spends a large portion of her time on screen responding to all of the events around her, but she’s pretty effective at doing so. The people we’re all here to see are Amy Adams and Glenn Close duke it out trying their absolute hardest to get the Academy to shine their face upon them.

This may be as good an opportunity as any to talk about the careers of Amy Adams and Glenn Close. These are two women who have both been nominated for six and seven Academy awards, respectively. Amy Adams has been going out there and doing everything she can to be noticed by the Academy, and manages to fall flat every time. On some occasions, she comes up against a tough category and loses to Regina King giving one of the best performances of the decade; on others, she loses to Anne Hathaway in a mediocre, if not outright bad, Tom Hooper movie. Just for a moment I want to talk about the 2013 Oscars and a little film called The Master. If you haven’t seen The Master, I’ll go ahead and let you know that it is one of the best films of the 2010’s, it is the best film made by Paul Thomas Anderson, and a collection of three of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen on screen, it also managed to lose or not even be nominated in every category it could’ve competed for at the Academy Awards. It deserves more recognition and I may one day write about it in full, for now all you need to know it was the best that Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams have ever been on screen. Amy Adams also does far more capital A acting in The Master than she does in Hillbilly Elegy. Glenn Close also has had a similarly difficult road to being christened by the Academy. She’s managed to find herself in some of the worst possible years to compete for an award; her first nomination losing to a wonderful Jessica Lange performance in Tootsie, falling to Peggy Ashcroft in David Lean’s historical epic A Passage to India, and most recently being shockingly upset by Olivia Colman’s magnificent turn in The Favourite. That most recent loss seems like such an upset because of Close winning at the Golden Globes and it seeming to be in the same vein as Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar win, it was “time for us to recognize Glenn.” The Glenn Close version of being robbed for your magnum opus is somehow not winning for Fatal Attraction. Go back and watch Fatal Attraction again. Just do it. They should’ve handed Glenn Close four Oscars just for the “I will not be ignored” scene. Cher fans, don’t come for me, because I feel just as strongly about the case for Holly Hunter losing for Broadcast News the same year.

In making the case for their untouchable resumes, I want to talk about what they’re doing here and why this type of Oscar bait historically works. The Academy loves it when performers transform into someone else, often it is historical figures, other times its a deranged comic book villain, but they want to watch an actor become someone they aren’t. They also have an upsetting and odd relationship to actresses in that they often recognize performances where beautiful women are put through the wringer. Whether it is Charlize Theron, Hillary Swank, Gabourey Sidibe, Brie Larson, you name it, the Oscars love when beautiful women are made not beautiful by any means necessary. And so we find ourselves at Hillbilly Elegy in which Glenn Close and Amy Adams are competing to see who can yell the most, do the most heartbreaking thing, and take the biggest beating from life. For all of my qualms about J.D. Vance’s troubling views of Appalachia, that’s not why this film doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because Close and Adams are just not giving their best here. The vast majority of the emotional moments, the scenes of J.D. trying to check his mother into a rehabilitation center and their confrontation in the hotel room being the exceptions, are ham-fisted and seem to lack the real emotion that Close and Adams are known to bring. Amy Adams for the most part is doing what she needs to do, even if she’s doing a mid tier job; she portrays a mother fighting against the disease of addiction while trying to raise two children and maintain a job. It isn’t great by any means and her performance is like an emo track from the early 2000s, quiet moments where she’s sweet to her kids are like the lead guitar bringing you into the song with a subdued vocal and then she starts to scream and curse and attempts to wreck her car, which is when the rhythm guitar and drums come crashing in. I say all of this, but I do not know Bev Vance and I cannot claim to understand the difficulties she faced in her addiction; I hope you, being the reader, can understand that I do not mean to undermine who she is today and who she was many years ago. I simply have some issues with the performance itself. Glenn Close is really the one I’m having a hard time with in this movie. It just seems to be a miss, her accent work doesn’t seem to have any regionality to it but rather it’s just “southern”, she’s just chain smoking and watching movies and yelling at people. It’s seems she was going for the Charlize Theron in Monster lane, making herself into an ugly and harsh figure in hopes of being recognized for her performance.

The novel Hillbilly Elegy is a complicated book about Appalachia, viewing the region through the lens of someone who “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps” and not looking at the failings of state and local governments to take care of their people and attempt to stop the opioid crisis affecting the region and the rampant drug trafficking going up and down the east coast. The film Hillbilly Elegy is a mediocre, if not bad, view of people who have lived unbelievably difficult lives and how we live affects everyone around us. I can’t recommend this movie, but you should go watch the other work of those involved; Amy Adams, Glenn Close, and Ron Howard have some incredible stuff in their filmographies.

Appalachia is a gem of our country and should be celebrated and protected. I’d recommend listening to The Bitter Southerner Podcast and their episode titled Hillbillies Need No Elegy or the piece on their website of the same name. I’d also recommend supporting charities in the region, I’ve listed some below, though they are all West Virginia specific because I adore it. Thanks for reading, I love you!

Save The Children- West Virginia (Fighting to create access to learning materials, after school programs, and vital supplies for parents)

Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Tri-State (Providing mentoring to the kids of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio)

Harmony House (Ensuring the basic rights to food, clothing, shelter, and healthcare for West Virginians)