Ron Howard (2020)

The moral of the based-on-a-true story told in Hillbilly Elegy – and made explicit in the protagonist’s closing voiceover – is that your background and upbringing dictate who you ‘are’ but the choices you make determine who you ‘become’.   The dichotomy of the two verbs is clumsy (why not ‘start as’ and ‘become’?); and the political point of view being expressed is bound to be contentious.  J D Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis was a controversial best-seller in 2016-17.  Ron Howard’s film adaptation, with a screenplay by Vanessa Taylor (Hope Springs, The Shape of Water), has been widely reviled by critics as ‘poverty porn’, for ‘perpetuating stereotypes about the poor’.  The myriad green splats on Rotten Tomatoes aren’t undeserved.  Politics aside, this is a shoddy piece of work from an Oscar-winning director and a high-profile screenwriter.

J D Vance was born, in 1984, and raised in Middletown, Ohio.  His mother Bev and her parents had moved there, when Bev was a child, from Breathitt County, Kentucky.  She was nineteen when she gave birth to J D’s elder sister, Lindsay.  J D was still a toddler when his parents split up.  Bev had recurring problems with drug addiction and her several failed relationships included three marriages.  Her own parents’ marriage, mired in alcoholism and abuse, had foundered, too, but, when their daughter’s addiction worsened, they reconciled to become J D’s de facto guardians.  His grandmother was a particularly strong and supportive influence.  After high school, he enlisted in the US Marines and served in Iraq, before studying political science and philosophy at Ohio State University.  He completed his bachelor’s degree there, went on to graduate studies at Yale Law School then became a venture capitalist – a career he now combines with work as a social and political commentator.  In 2014 he married Usha Chilukuri, formerly a fellow law student.  They have two children.

The title of Vance’s memoir reflects both his working-class Appalachian family inheritance and a conviction – rather, a hope – that ‘hillbilly’ culture is moribund.  The community his forebears were part of worked in low-paid blue-collar jobs many of which have now disappeared.  What’s more, Vance takes the view that hillbilly values, even though they include a commendable attachment to family and country, are conducive to social stagnation and disintegration.  He sees these tendencies, rather than economic deprivation, as the root cause of the problems he was exposed to during his own early years.

The film’s prologue is set in Jackson, Kentucky, at the end of the Vance family’s summer holiday there.  J D is a young teenager (played by Owen Asztalos); on the soundtrack, the voice of his older self (Gabriel Basso) recalls these Kentucky summers as the happiest of his life.  You wonder why, as you watch him going for a swim and getting knocked about by a bunch of slightly older local boys.  J D’s nostalgia is even harder to make sense of in light of the political gist of Hillbilly Elegy becoming clear but it doesn’t matter much because he never calls Kentucky back to mind:  the prologue was there only to get the hillbilly ‘theme’ up and running.  Once the Vances are back in Ohio, Bev (Amy Adams) expresses relief to her mother (Glenn Close), known as Mamaw, that they’ve returned ‘to civilisation’.  Bev’s remark is soon exposed as ironic.  Middletown anomie puts Jackson in the shade.

Even without prior knowledge of Vance’s life story, you can tell, as soon as J D’s voiceover starts up, that he’s remembering his youth from a position of relative security and comfort.  Howard and Vanessa Taylor move back and forth between the past, chiefly J D’s adolescence and the serial domestic traumas which dominate it, and the present, when twenty-something J D’s application for a job with a big-time law firm, at a crucial stage, is threatened with derailment, thanks to Bev’s latest heroin overdose and J D’s being called urgently home by Lindsay (Haley Bennett).  The film’s structure is limiting:  knowing J D has gone on to be a high-flyer dilutes the potential suspense of his teenage years.   Nor is the narrative fragmentation enriching.  Howard juxtaposes then and now sequences either by obvious melodramatic connection (moving from one unconscious or dead person to another) or by surface details (someone looks at a screen in the late 1990s, cut to a different screen being looked at a decade later).  The unimaginative script depends heavily on that voiceover, not just for scene-setting but to explain relationships hardly evident from action or dialogue.  For example, when his grandfather (Bo Hopkins) dies, J D reports that, with his passing, Bev lost the one person who really understood her.  Illustrations of the father-daughter rapport on the screen are next to invisible.

The relationship between J D and beautiful, brainy Usha (Freida Pinto) is a pedestrian affair; ditto the sequences at the formal dinner with representatives of legal practices that J D attends.  The chip on his shoulder looms large in conversation with the uniformly privileged group he sits among:  J D doesn’t know which piece of cutlery to use when, or the names of different wines.  (Why hasn’t the sophisticated Usha, who’s already been through this social test, coached him better?)  On his return to Middletown, he has an exasperating time arranging (and paying for) Bev’s care once she’s released from hospital.  When she refuses his help and he complains to Lindsay how impossible their mother is, his sister informs him that Bev was fucked up in her turn:  cue a younger version of Mamaw (Sunny Mabrey), at the end of her tether, setting fire to her drunken husband.  It’s hard to think J D wouldn’t already know about this but, from the look on his face, he’s astonished to learn about it.  More than anyone watching the film is likely to be.

With thirteen Academy Award nominations between them, and no wins, Amy Adams and Glenn Close head the list of living Oscar bridesmaids.  On paper, their roles in Hillbilly Elegy seem well designed to break their duck.  Close, in particular, has a lot going for her.  Two years after surprisingly missing out for The Wife, she might seem a shoo-in for a consolation supporting award.  Not only is she more than ever overdue; she’s also playing a character that requires physical and vocal disguise, which makes her acting more conspicuous.  Close is certainly forceful – overemphatic but occasionally affecting – and perhaps she will win[1].  But although Mamaw was a real person she doesn’t seem it in Howard’s film.  This hard-as-nails, swearing-like-a-trooper, tough-loving, chain-smoking, indomitable matriarch is an almost laughable cliché and Oscar-bait parody.  She has more than her fair share of deathbed speeches.

As the drug-addled, chaotic Bev, Amy Adams is also playing against type, though less blatantly.  Adams often looks right – she suggests someone who once promised, and wanted, to better herself – but Bev’s serial volatile outbursts never convince.  Howard probably doesn’t help Adams by repeated use of a handheld camera, which, by already destabilising what’s on screen, anticipates Bev’s eruptions.  These don’t, as they surely should, seem to come out of nowhere and take us by surprise.  Gabriel Basso is no more than adequate as the grown-up J D.  Online images of the man himself suggest that moon-faced Owen Asztalos, as the teenage version, is physically closer to the real thing.  Asztalos is also more emotionally expressive than Basso.

The ending of Hillbilly Elegy is gruesome.  J D Vance’s confirmed message is glued to a lurch, after nearly two hours of misery and mayhem, into conventional moral uplift.  Familiar shimmering-sloppy music (by Hans Zimmer and David Fleming) announces that all the main characters that haven’t died have Come Through.  The closing titles feature photographs of the actual Vance family, accompanied by summaries of how each of them is doing now. Even Bev has been clean for years.  Everyone has pulled their socks up.

1 December 2020

[1] Especially if the current odds on Gold Derby are correct in identifying Close’s main opposition.  Ahead of her in the betting are Amanda Seyfried (Mank), Olivia Colman (The Father) and Ellen Burstyn (Pieces of a Woman).  When Close was favourite for The Wife Colman won for The Favourite, deservedly but this could be an extra disadvantage – to add to recency – when sentimental considerations kick in.  Burstyn, aged eighty-eight, has veteran clout surpassing Close’s but has won before, albeit nearly half a century ago.  Seyfried’s is the only one of the other three performances I’ve so far seen.  I can’t believe it’s an Oscar-winning one but, then, I’ve thought the same about Patricia Arquette’s in Boyhood, Alicia Vikander’s in The Danish Girl and Regina King’s in If Beale Street Could Talk, all in this category, in recent years.