Hillbilly Elegy, directed by Ron Howard from the memoir by J.D. Vance, can most charitably be thought of as a stimulus package for the Oscar success of its stars Glenn Close and Amy Adams. Vance’s book, which I haven’t read, detailed his ascension from a childhood of poverty and drug-addicted adults to graduating from Yale Law School. The recent cultural conversation around the film has been dominated by Vance’s involvement in venture capital and his public support for Donald Trump, but the film is more an example of how boring Hollywood can be when it goes out of its way to be serious. Young J.D. (Owen Asztalos) enjoys being with his extended family in Kentucky, but his everyday life in Ohio is fraught with trauma mostly brought about by the drug addiction of his mother Bev (Amy Adams). Bev dominates quite a bit of Hillbilly Elegy, either by her outbursts – she attacks young J.D. in perhaps the film’s most disturbing sequence – or by the way her addiction forces an older J.D. (Gabriel Basso) to risk blowing a key job interview. Addiction is a dominant theme of Hillbilly Elegy, but Vanessa Taylor’s screenplay treats it not as a disease but as an outgrowth of socioeconomic problems. Bev is a nurse who succumbs to the easy availability of pills, but with the way that Howard calls attention to the poverty of Vance and his neighbors it’s a wonder that everyone isn’t hooked.
The other major character in Hillbilly Elegy is Mamaw, played by Glenn Close in a performance that is … doing a lot. Mamaw is J.D.’s grandmother, and for a good stretch of the film the adult who does the best job raising him. Mamaw is the moral center of J.D.’s world, and perhaps Close needed to play to the rafters in order to deliver the required Capital Letter Messages. But Hillbilly Elegy is so broad regarding both J.D.’s childhood and the way in which the older J.D. is embittered by his family’s situation that the performance feels more like it’s given in a concert hall than in a film. Amy Adams as Bev gets plenty of big scenes, but Adams is so self-possessed that in too many scenes Bev seems more like an attention seeker than an addict. I get why Adams would be attracted to this role, but she isn’t well served by the writing. Bev is constantly giving speeches to either apologize for or to justify her behavior, and the character is both written and played so big that she can’t help calling attention to the ways J.D. Vance wants to both celebrate his family and view them as an obstacle that he overcame. For a sulky if smart child, J.D. seems to know quite a bit about his family history. The best performance in Hillbilly Elegy is given by Haley Bennett as J.D.’s older sister Lindsay. Bennett plays Lindsay as believably tired and beleaguered, and when J.D. hands off care of Bev to her for the last time it is an open question whether making Bev Lindsay’s burden will perhaps consume them both – though to be fair it seems it didn’t. Hillbilly Elegy feels like a film out of time, a film that would have been shocking in a more insular time but that in a post-Trump America already feels badly dated.
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