Hillbilly Elegy (2020)

Back in 2016, JD Vance got his book “Hillbilly Elegy” published.
In 2020, Netflix turned it into a movie of the same name.
There were/are, for some reason, weird political interpretations of the book that various parts of the political spectrum have decided to glom onto and turn into various political rallying points.

I will not be discussing any of that – if you want to read any of the controversy, google it .
I’m just going to be discussing the very bad movie that was made from a pretty good book.

The book was written by JD Vance as an autobiography, explaining how he escaped poverty and turned his life around. He outlined the cultural quicksand of growing up in the rust belt and how the microcosm of cultural norms there – including ‘abuse’ as a standard of living – made it hard for people to escape the spiral of failure and make anything of themselves.

The movie… didn’t do any of that.
The easiest way to explain why this went so poorly was that it was a blatant failure of effective story telling.

The whole movie was shown and narrated by adult JD (Gabriel Basso) as a series of flashbacks interspersed over approximately 48 hours of his life at Yale. The flashbacks almost exclusively showed young JD (Owen Asztalos) during his childhood in Middletown, Ohio.

He mentioned how every summer was spent in Kentucky with his extended family, but time in Kentucky was only shown once.
He also mentioned how tough life was in Kentucky, with ‘tough’ being shown as young JD getting dunked in the local watering hole. It’s the kind of ‘difficulty’ that a young boy would share when he got to a new school to make himself sound tough, but a very strange thing for an adult to include as an indicator of difficulty.

At one point during a job interview at Yale, JD mentioned that his family was “Hillbilly Royalty,” because his grandfather was a cousin of someone who started the infamous Hatfield and McCoy blood feud. While I’m sure that sounds like a great ‘fun family fact’ to JD, it was one line and there was zero reasoning given for why that mattered, and anyone outside of that region of the country would have no reason to take that as anything of value.

Later, when JD’s grandfather, Papaw (Bo Hopkins), died and the entirety of Kentucky and/or Ohio showed up, JD said something about “we’re hill people, we respect our dead,” without bothering to share what that meant was or what would have made Papaw so important to earn such a turnout beyond family members.
There was another point where JD referenced some kind of ‘hillbilly honor code,’ and then absolutely did not elaborate on it, as if anyone who wasn’t from the rust belt would just know what it meant, including the entire audience.

JD’s mom, Beverly (Amy Adams) was shown to be an abusive bipolar drug addict, and… that’s it.
She had zero redeeming qualities – at no point did she do anything that made me think ‘oh, yeah, she’s a good person in a bad situation doing her best’ – she was just top-to-bottom terrible.
Repeatedly (seriously, like four or five times), JD stated how Beverly had been the Salutatorian of her graduating class, and that she was the smartest person he knew, but that her chances had been sidelined by getting pregnant at 18.
He even yelled that at a prospective employer at a Yale job interview – what his end-goal of that outburst was supposed to be is entirely unknown – and when he realized he’d just screamed at the dude he wanted a job from, he just looked mildly uncomfortable.
Beverly never bothered to show her supposed intelligence at any point, so it was never clear why JD was sharing that particular detail.
At one point Beverly beat young JD in the family car, then refused to take responsibility for the beating she just doled out, and that she could have had a better life if she hadn’t been a mother.

There was a scene near the beginning of the movie where one of Beverly’s many boyfriends/husbands brought home a puppy, which immediately did what puppies do: made a mess and peed on the rug. Beverly started screaming about the dog and about how she would kill it if it ruined her things.
I know it was supposed to be an establishing shot to show how messed up the family was, to show how far JD had to grow up. It certainly succeeded at showing the messed up bit, but the scene went on about five minutes too long. It quickly crossed the line into “shitty people being shitty to each other for shitty reasons” territory.
If I wanted to watch that, I’d pull up any episode of “Shameless” (2011+) and hate myself in 45-minute increments.

Mamaw (Glenn Close) was JD’s foul-mouthed grandmother, who existed purely to punch up a scene or impart some folksy wisdom that might sound useful, if you were born yesterday. She was clearly supposed to be the ‘moral compass’ character, but instead did the opposite of that.
To wit: in one scene, Beverly came home and asked young JD to pee in a cup for her so she could pass a urinalysis. JD was rightfully angry that she wasn’t clean enough to pass the test by herself, refused to fake the test for her, and stormed out. Mamaw followed and gave him a stern talking to about peeing in the cup because “maybe this time it will be different” and that they all had to keep trying to help Beverly.
You know, like a proper enabler.
Then, later, she gave JD a talk about making the right moral choice so he could be escape poverty, and that he should have “a right to your own life,” and later yet followed by “at some point you’ve gotta take responsibility, or someone else is going to step in.”
It’s the kind of moral ambiguity that leads to people making worse mistakes, not better choices.

There was one entertaining scene of a flashback from Beverly’s childhood where Mamaw threatened to light Papaw on fire if he came home late again, promptly followed by Mamaw lighting Papaw on fire the next night.
Kudos to her for following through on a threat.

During the 48 hours of life we saw adult JD in, he spent a majority of it talking to his then-girlfriend (now wife) Usha on the phone as she tried to be his rock while dealing with his mother who had yet again fallen off the wagon. JD didn’t treat her particularly well, and acted like her entire life was somehow flawless, blatantly disregarding the part where Usha said her father emigrated to the U.S. with a suitcase and the shirt on his back.
It’s pretty unsympathetic for you to claim your life is the worst when you’ve made it to Yale using the GI bill (following a very brief allusion to a tour in the Marine Corps) while your girlfriend is from an immigrant family who literally had less than yours did.

JD’s closing monologue was about how he wouldn’t be where he is today if it weren’t for his family, and that his success was theirs to share (again: ignoring his time in the USMC that got him the GI Bill so he could afford to go to college - a cause/effect function that his family wasn’t involved in).
That would have sounded like a far nicer concluding message if the film hadn’t spent its entire run time showing Beverly to be a failure of a human and Mamaw being a walking movie trope.
“Family matters above all else” is a great message for a kid’s movie about dealing with small life stressors like moving or a pet dying; it’s a really bad choice when the family you just showed is abusive.

The end of the movie had some title cards that showed where everyone is now.
Glen Close in a fat-suit and makeup looked identical to real-life Mamaw.
Everyone else was as average looking as I would expect for a movie based on a book about regular human beings.

Here’s the problem: all of the holes and problems I listed above – things that the movie absolutely didn’t explain – were explained in the book, and quite well. Book-JD effectively filled all the holes and gave all the answers.
Somehow, as director Ron Howard was converting the book to film, he dropped the ball and failed to show all the things that made the book so compelling, which is especially weird as JD Vance was one of the executive producers.

I shouldn’t have to tell a fellow audience member “well, if you’d read the book, this all makes sense.” There’s no appropriate time where a movie should have holes that can’t be answered by any media other than a prior movie.

This was made and hosted by Netflix, but it wasn’t even worth watching from the comfort of my couch.
At most, save it to watch on a plane, whenever we’re allowed to fly again.

Or just read the book.