Review: Hillbilly Elegy

Image courtesy of Netflix.

Ron Howard's adaptation of J.D. Vance's controversial autobiography "Hillbilly Elegy" - which arrived during the 2016 election and led some to proclaim it as an harbinger of things to come with Donald Trump's election - isn't nearly so scandalous as the book that inspired it (I've never read it, but know at least two people who did and had little regard for it), and comes across more as a "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" tale of an Appalachian man who manages to find some success in life, despite his background and formative years spent among a bickering, drug addled "hillbilly" family who hailed from Kentucky, but lived mostly in Ohio.

The picture jumps between 1997 - when J.D. (Owen Asztalos playing the younger version) is living with his drug addicted, semi-abusive mother, Bev (Amy Adams), but is often in the care of his chain smoking, potty mouthed Mamaw (Glenn Close, who eats the scenery and steals the show) - and 2011, when J.D. (the adult version is played by Gabriel Basso) is involved romantically with Usha (Freida Pinto) and trying to get a summer internship with a prestigious law firm while attending Yale University.

However, in the later timeline, J.D. is called home by his sister, Lindsay (Haley Bennett), because Bev has once again OD'd - this time on heroin - and J.D. must find a recovery program for her, all the while attempting to drive 10 hours back to Connecticut the next day for a job interview. 

Meanwhile, the film jumps back and forth in time, so that we see the strained relationship between Bev - a nurse who gets fired after popping pills at work and misbehaving - and J.D., and how the younger version of the lead character ended up living with Mamaw, who inspired him to lift himself up from his dysfunctional upbringing and succeed.

It's a traditional rags to riches scenario that features all the required beats - yes, there's a scene in which J.D. must defend his "hillbilly" background to a table of snobbish Connecticut lawyers, but no, there's not much of the political element from the book, from the descriptions of the frustrations of the white working class in the Rust Belt (which helped Trump rise to power) or the hatred toward multi-cultural Blue America, which pundits latched onto in the book and used as a reasoning for why Trump won.

Ultimately, the film version of "Hillbilly Elegy" is a somewhat generic story of a boy from the hills who comes to the city, finds some success and then must travel back to where he came from to settle some family business. You've likely seen it all before - and, most likely, presented better than it is here. It's not a bad movie - the acting throughout is pretty decent, especially Close, who seems to be having some fun hamming it up a little, and Basso as the older J.D. The film is well shot and works well enough narratively, even if it's a little too familiar.

In some ways, Howard's version of the story is preferable to the one I've heard described about the book - at this point, I don't really need any more rationalizations for the past four years or another profile of a Rust Belt denizen and the reasons why they voted the way they did. Therefore, "Hillbilly Elegy" is yet another tale of opioids, lost dreams and dysfunctional lives in middle America - as such, it's well-enough made, but not quite the political firebomb you might have been expecting.