Why Does Everyone Hate 'Hillbilly Elegy'? Here's What The Reviews Are Saying
"Hillbilly Elegy," which stars Amy Adams and Glenn Close, is currently getting horrible reviews by critics. Here's a look at why the movie, adapted from J.D. Vance's memoir of the same name, is so disliked, according to reviews. "Hillbilly Elegy" premieres in theaters on November 11 and is available on Netflix November 24.
The Movie Traces Author J.D. Vance's Life Growing Up In A Rust Belt Town In Ohio
Arriving during an expectation-shattering electoral season, J.D. Vance's 2016 book, "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis," hit a zeitgeist nerve. Against the backdrop of Donald Trump's ascendancy, Vance's story of his against-the-odds rise from Rust Belt poverty to the Ivy League was oft-cited in a hand-wringing national conversation (or shouting match) about the political establishment vis-a-vis the white working class. It offered a window into a world that most pundits knew nothing about.
We open with a pastoral, back-to-the-land lament, as a young J.D. (Owen Asztalos) describes how exploring the hills and hollers near his extended family's hometown of Jackson, Kentucky, makes him feel complete. But he, mom Bev (Amy Adams), sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett), and grandmother Mamaw (Glenn Close) can't stay long. Thanks to a chain of events that began with Mamaw getting pregnant at age 13, they've got to travel the "hillbilly highway" back up north to Middletown, Ohio, where they live. From there, the family's dramatic struggles begin to unfold, cutting between the late '90s (although you might be forgiven for thinking it was the '80s) and 2011. That's when an adult J.D. (Gabriel Basso), now a student at Yale Law School, is forced to come home and take care of some things after Bev overdoses on heroin.
While The Movie Seems To Be About The White Working Class, It Is Filled With Stereotypes And Caricatures
What might have solidified the movie's failure for me was a comment Close made during [a] Q&A, when she described the character of Mamaw as not all that different from other characters she'd played in "full drag," such as Cruella de Vil, Norma Desmond or Albert Nobbs — all larger-than-life caricatures of one kind or another.
[Vox]
Even if you put aside the politics of "Hillbilly Elegy," you're left with what Radha Blank, the director-writer-star of "The 40-Year-Old Version," would call "poverty porn," that lurid gawk into the lives of the less fortunate so that more privileged audiences can feel like they've experienced something genuine, whether it's a fried bologna sandwich or the washing and reusing of plastic cutlery. If this movie had been made by someone who understands Kentucky the way Richard Linklater undertands Texas, or with the empathy for the working class that Debra Granik or Sean Baker bring to their films, that would be one thing, but this is a movie that always seems to be on the outside looking in, indicating rather than understanding.
[The Wrap]
Unlike other contemporary chroniclers of working-class America — see Chloe Zhao's upcoming "Nomadland" for a more thoughtful story about what happens when a country neglects its people — Howard stages his images as if working from a Pinterest board of hard-knock key-words: "Appalachia," "welfare," "rust belt."
The Movie Also Fails To Grapple With Larger Social Issues
"Hillbilly Elegy" isn't interested in the systems that create poverty and addiction and ignorance; it just wants to pretend that one straight white guy's ability to rise above his surroundings means that there's no excuse for everyone else not to have done so as well.
[The Wrap]
One of the many frustrating things about this film is that it occasionally hits on a real issue — the pipeline from legal painkillers to heroin addiction, for example, or intergenerational cycles of teen pregnancy — then ties itself into knots in order to make those factors a matter of personal responsibility, sapping their political and narrative potency. Bev failed to renew her insurance, so it's really her fault she gets kicked out of the hospital after overdosing. Lindsay never stood up to their mother, so now she's "stuck" in a hell of oppressive assistant managers and uneven lawns.
Trading Vance's contentious socio-political arguments about the forgotten white, poor working class that resides in the Bible Belt — invoked ad nauseam when it was published in 2016 to explain the rise of Trump — Taylor and Howard sanitize their adaptation. Whatever political viewpoint the real Vance has (one only need look at his Twitter to get the alarming gist), "Elegy" wishes away this political discourse, neutering Vance's POV in the process. It's a strange thematic choice to take what made "Elegy" such a bestselling novel and completely ignore it. Bev's addiction is treated almost as an anomaly by Howard, instead of connecting her plight with the larger opioid epidemic.
It strips out Vance's sociopolitical commentary entirely, which, however you feel about the commentary, leaves the story without an all-important ingredient: a political and sociological point.
[Vox]
The Performances, For Better Or Worse, Are Very Melodramatic
Mamaw is played with very overripe overacting, big glasses, cigarettes and frizzy old-lady hair by Glenn Close, who prefaces every quaintly foul-mouthed outburst (barking things like, "Kiss my ruby-red asshole!") with an expression of stunned disbelief at the latest act of laziness or stupidity from her daughter or grandson.
Adams, as ever, gives it her best. She does manage to convince in some scenes, locating the fright and shame in Bev's self-destruction. Adams has a keen command of Bev's mercurial moods, swinging from tender to terrorizing in a second. But she can only fend off the film's stale, melodramatic characterization so much; she, like everything else, gets dragged into pat, reductive psychology.
If Close gives a mildly restrained performance, and she really is the best thing in the film, Adams shockingly miscalculates, playing every scene up to 11. This is capital-A acting and will perhaps go down as one of her worst performances, of which there aren't many.
And For A Movie With So Much Yelling, It Can Be Incredibly Boring At Times
It's never easy to articulate why a movie is boring, especially if the movie is as full of explosive fights and trips to the hospital as this one. My best explanation is that every scene seems to end with someone either calling the cops or losing their temper in a spectacular public fashion; at one point, someone is even lit on fire. (Once in a while there's a pause so that someone can give young J.D. a dramatic speech about Family or Loyalty or Hard Work.) Every scene peaks, with little to break it up, and thus the extraordinary becomes monotonous. There's little actual story to follow.
[Vox]
Like the worst kind of memoir adaptation, every scene in "Hillbilly Elegy" is an Event. The Day of the Fight, the Day of the Arrest, the Day of the Bad Dinner with the Snooty Lawyer Who Mocks J.D.'s Upbringing. That last scene also happens to be the same day J.D. finds out that his mother has relapsed and is in the hospital. The film leaves pretty much zero room for anything quotidian, anything usual, which might give the story some kind of subtle human texture, and make the dramatic stuff actually land with the intended impact. It's all yelling all the time, an exhausting litany of bad moments that renders the family's story just about meaningless.
TL;DR
"Hillbilly Elegy" just reinforces the stereotypes it insists it's illuminating.
[The AV Club]
And if you're still morbidly curious about just how bad the movie seems to be, here are some of the most scathing reviews from critics:
- "I'm not surprised that Howard, who has basically lived in his entire life in the film and TV industry, has trouble telling a story about people living in the Rust Belt struggling with poverty. I am surprised that Howard, who has been directing movies for over 40 years, could make a film this fucking bad." [Collider]
- "It requires serious cynicism to believe that any artist would make a piece of work solely for the sake of trying to win some shiny hardware, but the term 'awards bait' does still have merit when applied to the feeling a particular kind of film gives off […] Ron Howard's 'Hillbilly Elegy' is such a film." [CinemaBlend]
- "I am surprised it's as bad as it is. Written for the screen by Vanessa Taylor ('The Shape of Water,' 'Hope Springs') and directed by Ron Howard, it is distractingly Hollywoodified, a rich person's idea of what it is like to be a poor person, a tone-deaf attempt to assuage a very particular kind of liberal guilt by reifying the very thing that caused the guilt in the first place. And, perhaps worst of all, it's a very dull movie." [Vox]
- "Without a truly distinguishing 'Hillbilly' charm, it's simply a middling dysfunctional family drama with A-list actresses." [USA Today]
- "The book got popular at around the time that The New York Times was sending platoons of reporters into diners across the country in the hopes of understanding the 'real' American voter, and the people in those diners have genuine stories to tell. With 'Hillbilly Elegy,' all we get is the fried bologna sandwich." [The Wrap]
- "[T]he thought of rewatching Howard's film, which Netflix acquired the rights for in a heated bidding war, is enough to qualify as post-traumatic stress disorder. The director's professional, too-smooth-to-trust hands usually mash whatever material is chucked his way into a curiously flattened state of bland nothingness ('A Beautiful Mind,' 'The Dilemma,' 'The Da Vinci Code'). Here, though, he's decided to unleash a death grip on Vance's story, crushing its potentially interesting arc — poor boy turns Yale law graduate — into as finely disposable a powder as the Cheetos dust covering the kitchen counter of Vance's grandma." [The Globe and Mail]
Watch The Trailer
