Directed by: Ron Howard
Starring: Amy Adams, Gabriel Basso, Glenn Close, Owen Asztalos, Haley Bennett
Rated R, 116 minutes
It’s surprising how many of the most famous quotes in movie history look drab and clunky written out. Devoid of context, it’s hard to imagine how “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” or “You had me at hello” could have lingered in our collective memory; surely their resonance is thanks more to their delivery than to the written lines themselves. Still, the lines that stick with us couldn’t have stuck if they had been written differently. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t care” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
The question behind “Hillbilly Elegy” seems to be, can a movie will such iconic quotes into existence? Unfortunately, the lines that Ron Howard (“A Beautiful Mind”) and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor (“The Shape of Water”) would have us marvel at, many of them spoken by a bespectacled and bewigged Glenn Close (“The Wife”), are exactly as overwritten and awkward as they seem, especially when they aim for folksy wisdom. “Everyone in this world is one of three kinds,” Close’s Mamaw declares, while “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” a much better movie, plays in the background. “A good terminator, a bad terminator, and neutral.”
Mamaw’s grandson, JD Vance (played in youth by Owen Asztalos and in adulthood by Gabriel Basso), the real-life writer whose memoir provides the source material for the movie, is just another hill country hooligan until he wakes up one day to find himself at Yale Law School, interviewing for competitive internships with prestigious law firms. “Hillbilly Elegy” explores what brought him from a withering Ohio steel town to black tie dinners on the east coast, tracing a line through time and geography, through generations of poverty and substance abuse and feelings of helplessness against the forces that keep working people down.
Like last year’s “Little Women,” the movie threads back and forth in time while Vance, returning home to help his mother after a heroin overdose, reflects on the life he has, the life he could have had, and the people who made him who he is. But unlike “Little Women,” whose shifting timelines commented on each other in engaging ways, “Hillbilly Elegy” moves through time clumsily, the scenes in the past and present feeling more like dioramas. The action is flat, and often amped up from molehill to mountain before you can say “declined credit card.”
It’s not that the story of Vance’s life does a disservice to his family, or that it’s uninteresting, but it tries to its detriment to be universal. In the movie’s most perplexing moment, a young JD asks his hospitalized Mamaw, “Are you gonna die?” “I don’t know,” she responds, understandably dumbfounded, matching our own puzzlement at the question and the nonsensical conversation that follows. There’s no apparent need for the scene at all, except that this is an American drama, and Ron Howard and Vanessa Taylor evidently believe it would be incomplete without a maudlin scene by a hospital bedside. They want so badly for “Hillbilly Elegy” to be the story of America writ large that they strip its source material of depth in order to broaden its reach. The result is full of platitudes.
The cast proves the movie’s greatest saving grace. Owen Asztalos (“Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul”) and Haley Bennett (“The Girl on the Train”) stand out, not just holding their own opposite impressive performances from Amy Adams (“Arrival”) and Glenn Close, but often outshining them. In particular, Bennett’s performance as Lindsay, JD’s sister, is a genuine and calming presence throughout the movie’s sustained chaos.
Still, even good actors can’t make up for weak-willed storytelling. At its most philosophical, “Hillbilly Elegy” asks whether free will can exist in the face of the cyclical trends of history, and it tackles this question earnestly. But this personal history also reaches a dubious inflection point wherein JD Vance simply decides to make more of himself; one quick montage and an algebra test later, he’s at Yale Law School. His journey is supposed to be inspiring, but instead it’s officious and discouraging. It’s the old “poor people are poor because they just don’t have the drive to succeed” lecture in movie form, recognizing the real problems people face but ultimately too condescending to offer more than a pat on the back.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 12/4/2020.