<em>Hillbilly Elegy</em> Is One of the Worst Movies of the Year

J. D. Vance: Opioid of the masses

Hillbilly Elegy the memoir has since been dissected, challenged, and eviscerated. It largely focuses on the virtues of hard work and perseverance, launching vague broadsides against the American welfare state; the author often appears uninterested in interrogating deeper systemic issues. In adapting the book, Howard and the screenwriter Vanessa Taylor have gone even further, stripping the text of anything that might feel remotely controversial or pointed. Netflix’s Hillbilly Elegy is an Oscar-friendly narrative of personal triumph in the face of great hardship, a movie designed to end with an uplifting epigraph; it is also one of the worst movies of the year. Stuffed with A-list stars and tearful monologues, it is a neutral Terminator of a film—polished yet utterly inert.  

Howard, a filmmaker whose work I often enjoy, has a practiced hand with true-story movies (he directed Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, and Rush, among many others). But those stories usually have an incredible hook at their center, whether it’s the space chaos of Apollo 13 or the bitter suffering that the Formula 1 driver Niki Lauda experienced while pursuing victory in Rush (the latter might be Howard’s most underrated accomplishment of the past two decades). But in writing Hillbilly Elegy, Vance was pitching his tale not as extraordinary, but as merely one of thousands—his journey is inspiring, but it’s part of a larger social fabric, made compelling by the author’s pronouncements of how an entire generation of Americans had been left behind.

Perhaps that ambit is too much for a two-hour movie, or maybe Howard and Taylor were less intrigued by Vance’s sociopolitical analysis. Instead, the film plucks out the cleanest Hollywood narrative, one more clear-cut than even most Terminator movies. J. D. lives with his mother, Beverly (Amy Adams), in the Ohio steel town of Middletown (though the family hails from Eastern Kentucky), and while she’s sometimes sweet and loving, she’s often violent and neglectful, struggling with addiction issues and the pressures of single motherhood. With determination and the help of his wily grandma, J. D. eventually graduates from law school and makes something of himself.

The film isn’t working with bigger ideas, so it overcompensates for its straightforward storyline by ladling on the histrionics, such as Mamaw’s pop-culture rants and Bev’s harrowing behavior (at one point, she threatens to drive her truck into oncoming traffic with J. D. in the car). Close’s performance in the film tends toward steely goofiness—dressed in a fright wig and baggy sweatshirts, she bustles around every scene cursing and yelling tough-love homilies at the camera lens. Adams’s work is unfortunately calibrated, a gross pantomime of suffering that sees her screaming dialogue to the heavens, as if pain can be understood by viewers only if it’s expressed at the highest volume.