I’ve seen Hillbilly Elegy twice now — twice, gotdammit! After both viewings, I came to the same conclusion: This movie is boring as shit.
A prestige-y contender in this sure-to-be-abnormal awards season, Elegy is a Netflix-distributed trip through flyover-state America. The movie is based on J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir, in which he lays out how his wacky Appalachian family made him the Yale graduate and venture capitalist he is today.
But the movie itself is a dull, numbing affair. I don’t know if director Ron Howard — who I guess jumped on this because who better to helm a movie about rural America than Opie Taylor himself — made this to show that there are red-state residents who are flawed but generally decent humans — and not racist, Trump-loving pieces of shit. However, the whole thing is handled in such a neutral (and neutered) fashion, a painfully earnest view of the heartland that’s flat both visually and dramatically. (Veteran French cinematographer Maryse Alberti’s talents are friggin’ wasted here.) Truth be told, Howard brought more to the table when he was called on to cobble together that dark-ass Solo: A Star Wars Story.
As someone who has plowed through Vance’s book (well, as much as I could listen to on Audible), Elegy chucks out a lot. The book is basically a motivational manual for our poor, pale populace, with Vance recalling his upbringing — that is, when he’s not hitting you with stats about the American (read: white) working class and blandly unloading inspirational jargon. Yes indeedy, Vance is living, breathing proof of what can happen when you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work your ass off. It’s no wonder Elegy became a beloved text for the conservative crowd (which is funny, since Vance came from Democrats).
The movie not only ducks the issues of politics, race and class — which Vance touches on in the book — but also downplays his extreme, eccentric family history. Even though Vance describes his fam as “hillbilly royalty,” you wouldn’t know it from watching the movie. The plot mostly concentrates on Vance (Gabriel Basso as an adult; Owen Asztalos as a kid) and his relationship with his mother Beverly (Amy Adams) and grandmother Mamaw (Glenn Close).
Elegy is another one of those maudlin journeys through an adult’s turbulent formative years. Howard and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor (The Shape of Water) scatter our protagonist’s memories all over the place once Vance, struggling to make connections as a Yale law student, gets a call from her sister (Haley Bennett) to come back home and tend to his mom after a heroin overdose. It turns out former nurse Bev has a history of drug abuse, stealing opioids from her patients and doing erratic shit like roller-skating through the hospital. It’s a good thing Mamaw was around to get on that boy’s ass whenever he was failing at school or hanging with the wrong crowd.
Film Twitter has already raked Elegy over the coals for being the sort of cringe-worthy Oscar bait that just might give stars Adams and Close — dynamic actors who have been nominated for Oscars multiple times — the statuettes their asses should’ve received years ago. Of the both of them, Close is the one who really gets into the big-bad-mama cosplay. Her Mamaw is a limping, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, Terminator 2-quoting beast who is also — no big surprise — a caring, no-nonsense matriarch. Close appears to have more to work with than Adams, who doesn’t know whether to play her single mom as a troubled addict or as self-destructive and possibly mentally ill.
There is no doubt Elegy will win over viewers (and Oscar voters) who have their own dysfunctional family-size demons. Hell, Bev and Mamaw’s passive-aggressive tug-of-war reminded me of the toxic relationship my mother and grandmother (both deceased) had — two women who loathed each other, but who always saw each other every day because they knew they were stuck together. Now I assure you that movie would be a more intense, more honest experience than the TV-movie histrionics that go down in Hillbilly Elegy. It’s a film so staid, safe and inoffensive, I’m surprised that shit didn’t premiere on the Hallmark Channel.
