by Charles Kirkland Jr.
Ron Howard returns to directing with his adaptation of JD Vance’s autobiographical novel, Hillbilly Elegy.
While interviewing for an internship, insecure Yale law student JD (Gabriel Basso) gets a phone call for help. His mother, Bev (Amy Adams) is sick and needs his help. So JD drops everything and makes the drive to his Ohio hometown to rescue his mother along the way he may find the confidence to overcome his past and move toward his future.
Written by Vanessa Taylor (The Shape of Water, Divergent) based upon the best-selling book by J.D. Vance and directed by Oscar winner Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind, Frost/Nixon, Apollo 13), Hillbilly Elegy stars Basso and Adams along with an almost unrecognizable Glenn Close, Haley Bennett, and Frieda Pinto.
JD Vance is a venture capitalist who has appeared on many conservative news shows to comment on many financial matters including those of the Republican party. He received much notoriety because of his blue-collar upbringing in midwestern Ohio. He published the book Hillbilly Elegy in 2016 and was a New York Best Seller in that year and 2017. The book spoke about his upbringing and the social problems of his hometown which could be applied to most small towns in the Appalachian area. Unfortunately, the movie Hillbilly Elegy seems to avoid all those social and political issues and solely focuses upon the relationship that JD has with his family, particularly his mother.
Because this movie is a memoir of the life of JD Vance, Amy Adams plays Bev Vance at three different periods of JD’s life which calls for some makeup work for the aging process. The makeup work is very good not only for how they treat Adams but for the incredible transformation of the Oscar nominee Glenn Close. The lovely Close is almost totally unrecognizable behind huge glasses and big curly tousled hair as JD’s curmudgeonly grandmother, Mamaw.
While Adams has the juicier role in playing the seemingly bipolar mother who finds solace in chemical bliss, it is Close’s role that is the true support for the movie. JD’s memories of the intervening force that Mamaw served in his life is the impetus for the healing that JD needs to move forward with his life. Close is very convincing as the tough-as-nails, no-nonsense woman who sacrificed her life for her family and made sure that they valued family above all else.
Ron Howard has won two Oscars for directing movies that have been based upon true-life stories and a third movie, Apollo 13, probably should have garnered him at least a nomination. So this genre of film is the wheelhouse for Howard which may be why many people expected this movie to be an Oscar contender as well. This movie is not Oscar-worthy. Adams and Close may receive recognition for their work but the movie as a whole is lackluster and uninspiring. A major problem is that it uses pre-crawl end scenes to explain the outcomes of the characters in the movie instead of depicting them to be experienced. A short five-minute scene could have been inserted at the end of the movie that would be sufficient enough to allow viewers to observe the growth alluded to in the pre-crawl sequence.
Rated R for language throughout, drug content, and some violence, Hillbilly Elegy is a well-meaning bore of a film that does nothing for the viewers and wastes good acting performances from good actors. The movie also retreats a little from the source material and makes no connection between the Vance family experience and its global implications that made Vance popular.
Grade: C-
Check out Tim Gordon’s Reel Review, below: