As a film reviewer it can often be tough to separate out your thoughts of what you want a film to be versus what the film is and judging it accordingly. Hillbilly Elegy is a film that elicits such musings. The movie is held together not by its actors but by the mystique of Appalachia and every messy family drama we’ve ever seen. I tried to wrestle with my feelings on the film in the weeks since I screened it. I can confidently say however, that this film is not good by any metric you choose to evaluate the film.
Hillbilly Elegy tells the story of J.D. Vance (Gabriel Basso), a young law student at Yale University who is stressed about work placements and clerkships. One day he receives a call from his sister that his mom is having issues and he needs to come home. From there we see how he grew up under the care of his mother (Amy Adams), who has recently relapsed into drug use, and his grandmother (Glenn Close), who took him in and taught him life lessons.
On a filmmaking level, this movie is just average to below average across the board. The nonlinear structure of the story presents us with moments from when the main character was young and now that he is a Yale student. However, in telling the story this way, Hillbilly Elegy constantly robs itself of momentum and energy. You’ll be hard pressed to find a movie that feels longer than this one; the story structure and the editing does the movie and the actors no favors. Adams and Close get the lion’s share of the movie’s attention and both chew the scenery in every moment, but it feels less lived in than just loudly acted. Both of those actresses are quite gifted at digging into characters, but this movie does not give them much tangible to grab hold of.
This gets to the movie’s fatal flaw: an inability to tap into anything specific to elevate the story. It might come as a shock to some, but movies are at their most universal when they are their most specific. It’s in the unique details that audiences can recognize the themes that rise above and learn about the human condition. Hillbilly Elegy did not at all seem interested in the details that would have made this a richer story. Hanging around the movie is the spectre of the financial crisis, the shifting of industries, and the opioid epidemic and yet, Ron Howard and company do not seem interested at all in how those truly affected this family or the town. Instead, it just concocts a familiar poor white family drama complete with a no nonsense elder, a drug addicted parent, and a kid trying to do better.
A quick glance at the book synopsis states that the book is a story “about the Appalachian values of his upbringing and their relation to the social problems of his hometown.” With this movie however, I do not feel like I learned anything about what it really means to be from that part of the country or why the values his grandmother taught him aided him in life. Hell we don’t even get a good accounting for his mother’s drug use and how it ties into bigger conversations about drug use in that part of the country. It is not a movie’s place to educate but watching this movie, it felt like Ron Howard saw the renewed fixation on the white working class that allowed this movie to be made, and then didn’t care about the humans in his film. In this time and place, you are going to have to do more than present us with a basic tale of poor white family filled with Oscar nominated actors to be interesting, and Hillbilly Elegy does not do that.