Hillbilly Elegy Is One of the Worst Movies of the Year

[Celerity]

The new Netflix film is a think-piece trap—shiny on the outside, hollow on the inside.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/11/hillbilly-elegy/617189/



“Everyone in this world is one of three kinds,” declares Mamaw (played by Glenn Close), the wise grand-matriarch of Ron Howard’s new film, Hillbilly Elegy. “A good Terminator, a bad Terminator, and neutral.” I hate to correct Mamaw, who is trying to encourage her impressionable grandson, J. D. Vance (Gabriel Basso), to follow a righteous path by invoking Arnold Schwarzenegger’s beloved action franchise. But there is no such thing as a “neutral” Terminator; those cyborg heroes exist to either protect or destroy. I cannot imagine what a neutral Terminator would do, save sit in a chair and remain forever shiny and inactive.

Mamaw is entitled to her bad movie opinions, of course. But this monologue is the kind of speechifying that rings hollow throughout Hillbilly Elegy, an adaptation of Vance’s best-selling 2016 memoir that debuts on Netflix tomorrow. When it first arrived on bookshelves, Vance’s story was celebrated as a glimpse into an oft-ignored pocket of America: the white working class of Appalachia and the Rust Belt who swung to Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Hailed as an “anger translator” and cited by Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton, Vance wrote about growing up poor, living with a heroin-addicted mother, and clawing his way into Yale Law School. The book arrived at a seemingly serendipitous moment, offering a bleak but candid view of communities gutted by drug abuse and poverty.

Hillbilly Elegy the memoir has since been dissected, challenged, and eviscerated. It largely focuses on the virtues of hard work and perseverance, launching vague broadsides against the American welfare state; the author often appears uninterested in interrogating deeper systemic issues. In adapting the book, Howard and the screenwriter Vanessa Taylor have gone even further, stripping the text of anything that might feel remotely controversial or pointed. Netflix’s Hillbilly Elegy is an Oscar-friendly narrative of personal triumph in the face of great hardship, a movie designed to end with an uplifting epigraph; it is also one of the worst movies of the year. Stuffed with A-list stars and tearful monologues, it is a neutral Terminator of a film—polished yet utterly inert.



Howard, a filmmaker whose work I often enjoy, has a practiced hand with true-story movies (he directed Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, and Rush, among many others). But those stories usually have an incredible hook at their centre, whether it’s the space chaos of Apollo 13 or the bitter suffering that the Formula 1 driver Niki Lauda experienced while pursuing victory in Rush (the latter might be Howard’s most underrated accomplishment of the past two decades). But in writing Hillbilly Elegy, Vance was pitching his tale not as extraordinary, but as merely one of thousands—his journey is inspiring, but it’s part of a larger social fabric, made compelling by the author’s pronouncements of how an entire generation of Americans had been left behind.

snip

[Squinch]

1. Never got the appeal of the book. Thought it was crap.

And now there's a movie.

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. hard for me to even remember what my wife and I think of as a great

movie coming out in the last decade.

[Celerity]

3. Blue Is the Warmest Colour

La Vie d'Adèle

[LPBBEAR]

4. I dropped Netflix

after being a subscriber for many years. The quality of their "original" stuff just wasn't that good. I really got tired to seeing new videos touted as "new releases" only to have them turn out to be badly dubbed foreign crap. Not everything was bad but too much was to warrant our continuing to pay for the service.

[LuvNewcastle]

5. I did too.

The service was awful for me. Just as I would get interested in a show, it would stop and say that that selection couldn't be played at that time. Never had that problem with Hulu or Amazon. And as you said, their content isn't all that great, anyway.

[LPBBEAR]

8. The kicker

for me was a movie called something like "5 doods". Supposedly from Spike Lee. It was total crap.

[snowybirdie]

6. Hated the book

I couldn't get what all the fuss was about. No character was really interesting and most were downright unlikable. Won't watch Thanks.

[Paladin]

7. Any movie with a character named "Mamaw" loses me as a viewer. (nt)

[UTUSN]

9. The little buzz my way lamented that Glenn will get a consolation Oscar instead of her great stuff