OVP: Hillbilly Elegy (2020)

Film: Hillbilly Elegy (2020)

Stars: Amy Adams, Glenn Close, Gabriel Basso, Owen Asztalos, Freida Pinto

Director: Ron Howard

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Supporting Actress-Glenn Close, Makeup & Hairstyling)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I like reading, but I don't do it as often as I should or like, and shouldn't get credit for being a devoted reader if you're a bibliophile (I put away maybe 15-20 books a year-consider that a "frequent reader" or a "casual one" on your terms).  So it's not often that I get to see a movie based on a book from the past ten years and say "I read the book," but Hillbilly Elegy is weirdly a movie I can claim that about.  I was in a book club briefly that was focused on more modern literature, and one of the titles that was chosen was JD Vance's memoir, and so I went into it with little knowledge of what it was about (I didn't read it), and came away...truly hating the book.  The book is part a story of Vance's rough childhood, with a drug-addicted mother & a hard scrabble existence in rural Kentucky & Middletown, Ohio, but it's also a disgusting, oftentimes prejudiced look at race, economics, education, & the government.  It is not a film that I would normally pay money to watch, but considering both Adams & Close are in the Oscar conversation (and that it was free on Netflix), I did catch it, and while it's an improvement on the book...well, you saw the star rating, right?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie alternates between 1997 and 2011, and focuses on JD (Basso as an adult, Asztalos as a child), whose childhood is spent in near constant states of disarray due to his mother Bev's (Adams) issues with drug addiction, while as an adult he feels out-of-place with his Ivy League colleagues as he tries to get an internship as a second year at Yale Law.  JD is forced to take a trip back to see Bev, risking his interview, because she's become addicted to heroin, and has hidden his girlfriend Usha (Pinto) from them because (without saying so, but it's the clear implication) she's not white & he's not sure how his mother will handle that.  As the movie goes along, we see JD's relationship with his grandmother Mamaw (Close), which greatly influenced his life as she was a stabilizing factor in him not ending up like his mother, and in the end he gets the internship (abandoning his mother at a hotel after giving a speech about "family coming first" without even a hint of understanding the irony of that action), and as we see over the credits, his mother becomes sober & he marries Usha.

Ron Howard does a decent job of repurposing really problematic source material, even if he isn't always successful-I want to give the film that before we start because it could've been considerably worse.  Howard, unlike Vance, is a Democrat, and therefore doesn't share all of Vance's beliefs, and cuts out a lot of Vance's libertarian views on welfare (which are hypocritical in the books as he ignores the moments in the story when his family does take government money or charity), as well as Vance's problematic views on race.  Howard tries as hard as he can to simply make this a sentimental story about family & hard times, something that he has done before, and with great success.

But JD Vance is not Jim Lovell or James Braddock...he's no hero, and he's certainly not compelling.  Howard likely couldn't get the rights of the book & totally sideline JD's narrative in favor of the more interesting one between the two principle female characters, and as a result we are left with a rather ordinary child whom everyone keeps saying "has promise."  The reality is, though, that he doesn't-JD as written in the movie doesn't appear to be that smart.  In a truly uncomfortable scene, one that is meant to show the "otherism" of the intellectual, moneyed counterparts of his at Yale, he attacks them for thinking ill of his mother, but before that talks about his family as if he's ten, attacks their own experiences, and he does appear to have a severe lack of maturity & worldview that makes JD the character insufferable throughout (this was one of the many problems with the book).  JD is unlikable, and while obviously he rose above tough surroundings to make it to Yale (one has to assume that he has a modicum of intelligence, or at least ambition, in real life to get to that level), the character in the movie is hopeless.

You of course don't buy a ticket to this movie to talk about JD, even though it's his story; you buy it because Amy Adams & Glenn Close are starring in the movie.  I'm sorry to say that if you're here for them to finally win their overdue Oscars, they're either not getting them or they're getting them for the wrong performances.  Adams has no grounding in this woman, playing each scene to the hilt & creating no consistency in her; the script does her zilch favors (as does the entire quandary around JD being a black hole for charisma), but this is the worst performance I've seen from Adams.  It's a mess from a brilliant actress.  Close is better, and the only thing remotely worth saving in this movie (she plays her part much more subdued than Adams), but it's still dismissible, and she cannot ground the childlike idolization of Mamaw with her being a real woman.  It's a part that'd be easy to root for if you liked the movie...but I cannot fathom why someone would like this movie.