Flawed adaptation whose main virtue is casting Glen Close.
Hillbilly Elegy
Grade: C
Director: Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind)
Screenplay: Vanesa Taylor (co-writer of The Shape of Water), based on J.D. Vance book
Cast: Amy Adams (Arrival), Glen Close (Fatal Attraction)
Run Time: 1h 56 mm
Rating: R
By John DeSando
At the beginning of the Trump trip in 2016, J.D. Vance offered us a chance to understand the interior of the many backwoods citizens who voted for him. His memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, shows in minute, loving detail the virtues and vices of Appalachians too often ill-defined by Deliverance and Beverly Hillbillies. He shows they were more than vice by their somehow preparing him for Yale.
On the other hand, Ron Howard’s adaptation wallows in the vices to show his protagonist ascending or escaping, depending on how you look at it. J.D. (Gabriel Basso) is a mild-mannered, unassuming hillbilly, who in Kentucky and Middletown, Ohio, reveres and suffers gladly his addicted, train wreck mom, Bev (Amy Adams), and her mom, Mamaw (Glen Close), a tough nut who could give Ma Barker a run.
Close acts her usually well-crafted characterization, possibly meriting another of her many Oscar nominations, and Adams peers over the edge to hyperbole, not meriting another of her many nominations. Because Basso shows little range other than stoic sufferer (the casting flaw of looking like Vance, and that’s all), the film is left to the two ladies to eat as much of the scenery as they can outside the usual honey wagon.
As for the depth Howard is capable of, it didn’t travel to Appalachia, perhaps because he knows only the other side of the Mayberry tracks. Insights into the white working class are sparse because of the preponderance of violence and ignorance.
In no way could we understand how this young man worked his way to Yale Law School other than winning the best grades in Algebra because Howard and seriously-good writer Vanessa Taylor have him reacting, mostly helplessly, to the wacked-out ladies in his life. And by the way, J.D. extols the intelligence of his mother without showing those credentials, other than her choosing one loser after another for partner.
With Howard’s adaptation, we are no better understanding a complex society that would have given Trump four more years. With Vance, I at least understood the layers, some better than others. Perhaps Taylor and Howard took too seriously the dark side of the word “elegy.” Vance saw the poetry. Howard sees the prose.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JohnDeSando62@gmail.com
