By Sandra Hall
HILLBILLY ELEGY ★★★★
(M) 115 minutes, Netflix
When J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, came out in 2016, it was greeted by some as a window to the grievances and deprivations that have gone into the makings of the Trump voter. He argued that white working-class discontent in America was caused not only by poverty and disadvantage but by a “learned helplessness” which had drained away energy and ambition down the generations.
A barely recognisable Glenn Close is the standout in Hillbilly Elegy, which is based on J.D. Vance's best-selling memoir of the same name.
It was a theory that set off some loud alarm signals and those who didn’t agree were quick to say so. Vance, they claimed, had used his own experiences as a poor white kid growing up in the Appalachians and the Ohio rust belt to reach a flawed conclusion about all such families under pressure.
But detractors and admirers all read the memoir, turning it into a provocative bestseller and a book Hollywood had to have. The rights eventually went to two of the industry’s most prominent names – director Ron Howard and his producing partner Brian Grazer. And the result is a typical Howard movie. The book’s hard political edges have been planed away, leaving a highly polished piece of storytelling in the great Hollywood tradition of working-class soaps.
There are still traces of politics. You can find them in the string of doomed hopes and the surrender to addiction and alcoholism that stain the Vance family history, but you’re left to make up your own mind about the reasons for these failures. Howard has always been fascinated by the shifts and patterns that shape family life and this is the prism through which he and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor view the story.
J.D. (Owen Asztalos) is 14 when we first meet him and the most powerful people in his orbit are women – his mother Bev (Amy Adams), who is bright, funny and dangerously volatile, especially when she’s in the grip of the drugs she takes in an effort to dull the effects of her many disappointments; his sister, Lindsay (Haley Bennett), who’s about to escape into an early marriage; and his grandmother Mamaw (a barely recognisable Glenn Close).
It’s Mamaw who sets him on the course that will take him to Yale law school with her distinctive variety of tough love. And Close embraces the role with gusto. With a limp, a stoop and an ever-burning cigarette clamped between her teeth, she strips his future down to the basics with a stream of advice flavoured by her gift for the aphorism and her inventive way with four-letter words.
And Adams is a match for her, catching Bev’s sweetness along with the speed and suddenness of her emotional gear changes. This leaves Asztalos and Gabriel Busso, who’s cast as the adult J.D., to play the straight man but they’re never overshadowed.
Fans of the book are already complaining the film blunts its keenest insights and they’re right. Yet there’s a lot to be said for Howard’s high-end brand of commercial movie-making. He has a sure feel for narrative rhythms and here he’s to be applauded just for inviting Close, with her wealth of imagination and technique, to give us everything she has.