Hillbilly Elegy movie review: Shallow and dreary family melodrama

With a powerful cast including Amy Adams and Glenn Close and a respected director, this should’ve been a slam dunk. It’s really not.

When you have powerhouse actors Amy Adams and Glenn Close in a movie directed by Ron Howard, you think you’re in for something great.

You think you’re going to hear the words “Oscar buzz”, especially for perennial bridesmaids Close and Adams who between them have 13 nominations and no win.

Hillbilly Elegy is not going to be that shot because no one deserves to be awarded for this melodramatic, dreary, poverty porn of a movie.

Ostensibly an exploration of the hardships of white working-class Americans through the prism of a family drama, Hillbilly Elegy falls into the trap of being so overwrought, it’s immensely off-putting.

Despite being adapted by screenwriter Vanessa Taylor from 36-year-old commentator and venture capitalist J.D. Vance’s memoirs, the story is too generic to be affecting.

Amy Adams plays a drug-addicted, abusive mother

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Set across two time periods, in 1997 and 2011, Hillbilly Elegy centres on J.D. as a young teen (Owen Asztalos) and then as a young adult (Gabriel Basso) at Yale Law School.

In 2011, he’s gunning for a summer job at a prestigious law firm, which he needs to pay for his tuition. At a schmoozy dinner, he finds himself out of depth – he doesn’t know what to do with all the forks or which bread plate is his.

One of the firm’s partners chuckles about his background and makes an offensive remark about “rednecks”. We’re supposed to see this as the height of coastal elitism, a rich guy in a well-fitted suit who mocks middle America and the folks that wash up plastic disposable cutlery after a kids’ party.

J.D.’s sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett) calls him during the dinner to tell him their mother Bev (Adams) is in the hospital after overdosing on heroin.

Hillbilly Elegy is a shallow bore

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Returning to his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, J.D. must face his family’s demons while trying to decide whether he’ll be able to escape the cycle of poverty that’s haunted his kin for generations.

Half the film takes place in flashback in 1997, in the months leading up to a pivotal moment that explains how he ends up matriculating in the ivy-covered buildings of Yale Law School 1200 kilometres from his family.

There is no nuance in Hillbilly Elegy’s examination of class in the US, especially when its ending pushes the fallacious belief that boot-strap-pulling is all that’s needed to escape generations of disadvantage.

Hillbilly Elegy isn’t expected to be a complex treatise on intersectionality. But considering it damns its key female characters – Bev and grandmother Mamaw (Close) – to a grim life, it should at least acknowledge how J.D., a straight white man in America, even a poor one, had privilege his mother, grandmother and sister didn’t.

It’s not as simple as it being a “choice” he was strong enough to make.

Glenn Close and Amy Adams have 13 Oscar nominations between them but no wins

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Bev is an abusive addict. Any moments of tenderness are undone by the constant emotional and physical terrorism she inflicts upon her children, the weight of bitterness dragging her down into a drug-induced abuse.

Adams’ performance is over-the-top and Bev’s erraticism leaves little room for empathy. Hillbilly Elegy – and perhaps the real-life Vance – never effectively argues that there is redemption in Bev.

J.D.’s grandmother Mamaw (Close) is a tough-love woman who, we’re told, fled the family’s roots in Appalachia when she was pregnant at 13.

Hillbilly Elegy throws around all these stereotypes about the poor, white underclass – drug use, teen pregnancy, violence – without any real curiosity about the why or the economic structural frameworks that fuel these behaviours.

Haley Bennett, Gabriel Basso and Amy Adams in the 2011 timeline

It should be noted that the “Hillbilly” in the title refers to the Appalachian Mountains that run down inland along the east coast of the US, and where the derogatory “hillbilly” moniker comes from. But the movie is set in an Ohio suburb, sort of midway between Cincinnati and Dayton, which is where Vance actually grew up – he spent summers in Kentucky.

Hillbilly Elegy purports to be this window into “hillbilly” culture but gives you nothing more than “family is important” and “we respect the dead”. And that sums up the whole film, emblematic of its shallow storytelling and lack of shading.

Adams and Close deserved better than this relentlessly gloomy, often trite, movie. We all did.

Rating: 1.5/5

Hillbilly Elegy is on Netflix from Tuesday, November 24 and is also playing in select cinemas

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