Hillbilly Elegy movie review: Trump’s people writ large

Glenn Close, as Mamaw, and Amy Adams as Bev, in Hillbilly Ellegy. Picture: Lacey Terrell/NETFLIX

Glenn Close and Amy Adams have 13 Oscar nominations between them. They each should add to that for their superb performances as mother and daughter in Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy, based on the 2016 memoir by JD Vance.

With a bit of luck, on top of a lifetime of hard work, Close, now 73, should no longer have a ­record she doesn’t deserve: seven nominations without a win.

As her character, Mamaw Vance, tells her young grandson, JD, at one point, “Where we come from is who we are, but we choose every day who we become.”

That homespun wisdom goes to the heart of this story. The book, published a few months ­before the 2016 US election, is the best one I have read on the socio-economic shifts that Donald Trump rode into the White House.

Vance, the author, was born in Kentucky, but his family soon moved to Ohio, his father seeking work in the steel mill. He grew up in the American rust belt, which responded to Trump’s promises of rebuilding America. The Republican flipped Ohio in 2016 and held it in 2020, after it had voted Democrat in 2012 and 2008.

“Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks or white trash,’’ wrote Vance, who is an executive producer on the movie. “I call them neighbours, friends and family.” He admits they are deeply flawed, but this hardly makes them unique.

In the opening scene the young JD (a remarkable Owen Asztalos) is swimming at a waterhole on a trip home to Kentucky when a group of older boys nearly drown him. “Go back to Ohio, boy!’’ they tell him. Imagine if he had come from Massachusetts.

He is rescued by his family. When his grandmother hears of the incident, she asks, “Did you tell them dickhead bastards that three of them ain’t worth one of us?’’

Then she looks through her handbag, perhaps for one of the cigarettes that rarely leave her lips, and we glimpse a handgun.

Vance’s book made me think about a considerable group of Americans who turned to Trump: white, working-class people without ­college degrees. This screen adaptation, written by Vanessa Taylor, an Oscar nominee for The Shape of Water, draws on three generations of Vance’s family to encapsulate this broader story.

The adult JD Vance (Gabriel Basso) is not yet the one who wrote the book. It’s 2001 and he, after a stint in the Marines and then finishing a law degree at Ohio State University, is on a scholarship to Yale Law School. He is ribbed about that back home — called the “Yale boy” — but not without affection and respect.

There is a humorous moment where he’s at a dinner at Yale and is thrown off by the table settings. He makes his excuses and ducks outside to call his more sophisticated girlfriend. “Why are there so many f. king forks?”

With her advice he manages the cutlery, and the choice between chardonnay and sauvignon blanc, but he then has to return home, despite having an internship interview the next day, ­because his mother, Bev (Adams), who is a nurse, is back on drugs.

This decisive moment sets up the narrative that takes us into the past and present lives of each of the family members.

The director blends the three timelines without any notice, a back-and-forth that takes a ­little getting used to, but is there for a reason, underscoring the permanence of family, for ­better and for worse.

We learn that Mamaw fell pregnant at 13. Her daughter, Bev, did so at 18. Her children are JD and Lindsay. They live in Middletown, Ohio. There is no father on the scene.

“I never had a life where I wasn’t thinking about kids,’’ Bev says — almost screams — at one point. She is an angry, frustrated woman and sometimes she takes it out on her children.

The young JD is a central character along with his mother and grandmother. A scene where he’s in a car with his mother, who is driving at reckless speed while telling him how lucky he is compared with herself, is near-perfect, as is one where Mamaw, who has watched Terminator II about 100 times, explains to her grandson the difference between good Terminators and bad Terminators. Watching Close do this is something not to be missed. Indeed, every scene she is in is not to be missed.

Early on, in one of the occasional voice-overs that introduce the authorial voice, JD says, “We were all different in Middletown, somehow. Something was missing. Maybe hope.”

Maybe or maybe not. The real JD Vance went on to be a venture capitalist and successful ­author. Perhaps he never forgot his Mamaw's words: “You. You gotta decide if you wanna be somebody or not.”

Trump is out of the White House now, but the timeliness and relevance of this fine movie has not diminished.

Hillbilly Elegy (M)

Three and-a-half stars

Select cinemas, Netflix from November 24

Zita Hanrot in French film School Life.

There are enough movies set in the classroom and schoolyard to fill a school curriculum. As a late teen I frequently studied the film Class, inspired not by Rob Lowe but by his co-star Jacqueline Bisset.

The French language drama-comedy School Life reminds me of an earlier and more famous film: To Sir, With Love, starring Sidney Poitier and directed by Australian novelist and filmmaker James Clavell.

The school in this case is in Saint-Denis in northern Paris, a place with a high population of non-white migrants. There is poverty, crime and drug use. In To Sir, With Love the school is in London’s East End.

There’s a new arrival at the school: vice-principal Samia Zibra (Zita Hanrot). Like Poitier’s Mark Thackeray, she’s a migrant herself, with Algerian bloodlines. And she, too, is in a job that is not part of her career plan. We soon learn the reason she is in Saint-Denis and it’s one that links her to some of her students.

It’s the students, most of them non-actors, who make this movie authentic, who take the viewer into the classroom, into the playground and into their homes. Liam Pierron is outstanding as Yanis, a 15-year-old who is smart and witty but who needs to learn some limits. Gaspard Gevin-Hie is terrific as the young man who is in a minority: he’s white. His response is to be the class clown.

The joint directors, Fabien Marsaud (the French slam poet who uses the professional name Grand Corps Malade) and hip-hop dancer Mehdi Idir, are each from Saint-Denis. They bring this background and their love of music to the 111-minute film.

The focus is on Yanis and other students who are dubbed NOPs. It means they have not chosen elective options such as languages and music. There is no Latin, no carpe diem, no dead poets here.

One teacher tells the new vice-principal that the NOP class is “all the dunces together”.

Other teachers are more supportive, perhaps because they know they are dealing with incarnations of their younger selves.

There is a lot of humour, especially in the meetings between teachers, students and their parents. Watch for the scene where the lad who is a compulsive liar translates into Arabic, for his mother, his teacher’s assessment of him.

The main question is whether there is any future for these kids. I think viewers will hope the answer is yes.

School Life (M)

Three stars

Select cinemas from November 19