As the poster for his latest work says, Ron Howard has made many great movies – A Beautiful Mind and Apollo 13 to name a few. On the other hand, films like The Dilemma prove that some of his work does fall below average now and then. His latest Netflix produced feature, Hillbilly Elegy, sits squarely in the middle; a stock-standard awards-bait drama that doesn’t really have a lot to say other than some fairly rote dialogue about the lower class having to rely on tough love to get through their troubles. The acting is typically great from veteran performers Amy Adams and Glenn Close, but outside of that the film never finds a groove or a spark to get things moving in a way that is unlike anything you’ve seen before in a thousand “just fine” dramas.
Our guide into this backwoods American world is young J.D. Vance (Gabriel Basso), third generation in the Vance clan on the cusp of escaping his lower class roots and achieving great things at Yale law school. Just as he begins to take that education to the next level through legal internships, he’s drawn back to his old home of Ohio by the news that his mother Bev (Amy Adams) has relapsed and overdosed on heroin. With a day before a pivotal interview, J.D. heads home to assist his sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett) in finding the Vance matriarch a rehabilitation facility. During the trip J.D. begins to reminisce about his childhood in Ohio; where he struggled with abuse at the hands of his mother, eventually moving in with his grandmother Mamaw (Glenn Close) to complete his schooling. As J.D. comes to understand his mother and grandmother’s own struggles from the past, he begins to forgive them for their weaker moments and thank them for the lessons he has carried through to adulthood.
The biggest issue here is just how scatterbrained and non-focused the story seems. Howard seems unsure whether to focus on the drug addiction Bev struggles with, the poverty which has impacted the Vance family or J.D.’s attempts to escape his past, ultimately touching on all of them but never taking that deep dive into a central story to carry us through the film. J.D.’s journey back to Ohio is constantly interspersed with flashback scenes of him as a young child (played by Owen Asztalos) wherein we see these pivotal moments in the young man’s life that have prompted him to strive for a better future. Only there seems to be one pivotal moment that really sparks a change, and it is about as contrived and convenient as you can get, with the last 20 minutes of the film tying the flashbacks and modern day story together. All the earlier flashbacks, you then realise, serve no purpose other than showcasing some stellar acting. Bev’s drug addiction storyline has a lot of potential and Adams is totally locked in and committed to the character, but there just isn’t much commentary on addiction that hasn’t been seen before. It is ultimately a cycle with Bev in its clutches and J.D. helpless to aid her. The place where the film leaves her character doesn’t at all tie up with the pre-credits text (detailing the real Bev’s progress) and serves to leave the whole storyline seeming unfinished.
The characterisation of J.D.’s mother and grandmother are excellently brought to life by Adams and Close – no doubt about it they should (and will likely) be in contention for the big awards come Oscar season. The prosthetics and makeup work on Close alone is phenomenal and only once you see footage of the real Mamaw in the credits do you understand just how picture perfectly accurate she looks. Amy Adams swings for the fences in every scene, showing some real humanity and light in her eyes in the quieter moments, which is often overshadowed by the rage and craziness that ensues when her drug habits kick back in. These scenes are great to watch, just to see actors of this caliber giving it their all. When the mother and daughter do eventually face off it is electric, dripping with unbridled anger and tension as you expect the situation to devolve from a heated argument to fisticuffs at any moment. The issue with a lot of these scenes is that they don’t add much to the overarching story of J.D. other than to say he comes from a place of violence and is used to “tough love”.
That phrase really seems to be the hill that Hillbilly Elegy dies on. That no matter how badly you are treated and how dire your circumstances, the people in your family love you regardless. That is all well and good but the film has a hell of a way of showing it, especially in the turn of Glenn Close’ Mamaw, who for so much of the film is the understanding shoulder J.D. cries on when his mother is out of control, but who, when J.D. goes to live with her, turns into the very thing he was running from. Tough love is hard to express when there doesn’t seem to be much “love” involved. Screaming and beating your grandson isn’t all forgiven because you walk away and smile to yourself because he passed a maths test and he happened to see you. Ultimately Howard ends the picture with some optimism and hope that things will turn out alright for J.D. (which they have in reality) but one small, minutes-long montage scene hardly makes up for the previous hour and a half of deeply unsettling viewing. This isn’t something you would throw on for a relaxing Sunday afternoon watch, it is a hard, exhausting watch of the realities facing the lower class who aspire to realise the “American Dream”.
Every year there seems to be one or two awards contender films that only really seem present because of the phenomenal performances of the talent involved. Hillbilly Elegy falls squarely into that category, with some solid, if unremarkable, directing from Ron Howard and a fairly rote, paint-by-numbers plot that is buoyed by absolutely brilliant turns from Amy Adams and Glenn Close. While it is worth a watch for these performances alone, Hillbilly Elegy will soon fade out of memory, similar to the way it asks you to forget that child abuse is a bad thing for two uncomfortable hours of your life.
Hillbilly Elegy stars Amy Adams, Glenn Close, Gabriel Basso, Hayley Bennett, Owen Asztalos & Freida Pinto – Streaming on Netflix now.