Mark Reviews Movies: HILLBILLY ELEGY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 10, 2020

Perspective matters, not only in telling a story, but also in what we should take from that story. The perspective of Hillbilly Elegy, a movie adaptation of J.D. Vance's 2016 memoir, is a fairly limited one. In this story, a young man, attending Yale Law School, returns to his hometown in Ohio to help his mother, who recently overdosed on heroin. While that story plays, the man's past, as well as flashes from a more distant past, reveals itself, showing us what it was like for him as a child, living amidst economic uncertainty and various unaddressed conflicts within his family.

There's a much broader story here. Indeed, there are at least two broader stories in the background of Vance's personal account, adapted by screenwriter Vanessa Taylor. One of them is what happened to this Ohio town, once prospering with the jobs and industry of a local steel mill but later, by the time our protagonist is aware of it, filled with boarded-up storefronts, as people linger on streets, sidewalks, and parking lots with nothing to do.

Something big happened here, reflective of the seismic change to labor and industry and socioeconomic standings in the United States. Taylor and director Ron Howard definitely want us to notice.

After the movie's opening sequence, telling us how the young protagonist felt more at home in the family's native spot in the Appalachia region of Kentucky, Howard juxtaposes the current family's return home with its initial migration to Ohio. The mill was running back then, when the protagonist's grandparents packed up the car and moved, and the streets with filled with people going about "normal," everyday lives. As a child, though, the boy's town has fallen. As a young man, the protagonist's hometown is even worse. This matters, although only as backdrop to this particular story.

The other broader tale belongs to the family, beyond adult J.D. (Gabriel Basso) and his younger self (played by Owen Asztalos). The movie paints a better picture of this side of the story than the decline of the industrial Midwest, obviously, but even so, it comes up significantly short. There are people here—mainly relatives but also friends—who have lives and pasts stretching beyond the eyes and understanding of our main character. It's complicated and painful and filled with aching memories, failed dreams, and uncertain futures.

They matter. They just don't matter in the big picture, which is all about J.D. trying to learn enough about how bad life was and is in his hometown and within his family that he needs to escape this place and these people.

In the present, student J.D. is looking for an internship at a law firm that will keep him close to his girlfriend Usha (Freida Pinto). While dining with prospective law partners, he receives a call from his sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett), who inform him that their mother Bev (Amy Adams) overdosed. He returns home and tries to arrange a place for Bev in a rehab facility, all while a ticking clock for a job interview the next morning counts down.

In the past, young J.D. has to deal with the mercurial moods of his mother, while seeking support and attention from his grandmother, affectionately called Mamaw (Glenn Close). We see the start and decline of Bev's addiction, and the smart, upright J.D. eventually starts down a potentially similar path.

There is, in other words, a whole world—many worlds, really—within this story. Perspective matters, though, and the perspective here is so limited that the entire world seems to revolve around one man and his love/hate relationship with a place and people that he fails to truly comprehend.

The movie's tone, guided by J.D.'s narration and viewpoint, veers between romanticizing certain elements of this downhome culture, a scolding attitude toward certain issues and a jokey outlook on others, and just wallowing in the abject misery of this place and these people. It's all over the place, really, although there's one position upon which the movie never genuinely stops: compassion.

There is plenty of room for it. Bev, played convincingly in all her shifting states by Adams, is either the survivor of or witness to years upon years of domestic violence, both suffered and doled out by Mamaw in her younger years. As far as we can tell, Mamaw has overcome that, although seems incapable of confronting or addressing her own role in her daughter's gradual downfall into the same and other habits.

The movie presents the cycles of addiction and abuse, not with any insight or thoughtfulness, but with a sense of inescapable fate. From this perspective, these characters are essentially condemned to these lives for reasons beyond the movie's ability or willingness to confront. Their lives and problems really don't matter to this story, except that they give J.D. a few lessons to learn and a whole lot from which to run.

All of this, of course, is intended to be inspiring. Hillbilly Elegy, though, is so confined to a single viewpoint, unable or unwilling to sincerely consider anyone else's, that it leaves us feeling alternately dejected and empty.

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