117 min | R | November 11, 2020 | Netflix
J.D. Vance gets a law school dinner crisis and flashes back to his Appalachian childhood and his drug-addicted mother. Ron Howard turns a memoir about class and poverty into a parade of slammed doors and screaming matches. The misery is loud and the meaning is nowhere.
Hillbilly Elegy adapts J.D. Vance’s memoir into a two-track story. In the present, a Yale law student named J.D. drives home to Ohio when his mother overdoses, and the trip threatens a job interview that could change his life. In the past, a younger J.D. survives a household ruled by his mother’s addiction and his grandmother’s hard love. The film insists these are stories about Appalachia, class, and the cost of escape. What it actually delivers is a highlight reel of family dysfunction with the political and economic context stripped out.
Amy Adams plays Beverly as a woman in permanent crisis, lurching from manic affection to violence within a single scene. The performance has no register below a ten. Glenn Close plays Mamaw under heavy prosthetics and oversized glasses, chain-smoking and barking wisdom in a flat Kentucky drawl. She commits to the costume more than the character, and the film treats her aphorisms as gospel. Gabriel Basso plays the adult J.D. as a blank, and Owen Asztalos as the younger version absorbs the chaos with wide eyes. Haley Bennett gives Lindsay the only quiet, lived-in moments the film allows.
Ron Howard directs Vanessa Taylor’s script as a series of confrontations connected by montage. The cross-cutting between timelines exists to manufacture momentum the story does not earn, and the editing reaches for an emotional payoff every few minutes. Maryse Alberti’s camera lights the trailers and kitchens with a clean, glossy sheen that contradicts the squalor on the page. The score swells under every breakdown to tell the audience how to feel. Howard films poverty as a set of obstacles to be overcome rather than a condition to be understood.
The book argued, however clumsily, about culture and responsibility and the people left behind by the American economy. The film keeps the trauma and discards the argument. It asks the audience to weep at a family’s pain without explaining why that pain exists or what it means. Two of the best actors working are handed accents and meltdowns instead of people. The result mistakes volume for depth and suffering for substance.