Review by Ash Baker and Cam Watson
Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy was adapted from the 2016 best-selling memoir written by now-millionaire Ohio-native J.D. Vance. Vance was raised in Middletown, Ohio but grew up vacationing in Jackson, Kentucky where his extended family lived. It is through this lens of Breathitt County, the poorest county in Kentucky, that Vance centers his opinions of Appalachia; this is where he comes into his identity as a “hill person,” or a hillbilly. The film attempts to detail his transition from hillbilly to Yale Law graduate.
Also perhaps worth noting: this review is written by Ash Baker, from Knox County, TN, and Cam Watson from Sevier County, TN. Ash’s family lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in Blount County, TN, and Cam’s lives on the other side, in the North Carolina foothills.
Ash: Though Cam and I will examine Ron Howard’s film itself in the following paragraphs, we feel it’s important to look at the source material first. Hillbilly Elegy self-describes as a “Memoir of Family and a Culture in Crisis.” The culture in question is poor white culture: what Vance refers to as Appalachia. The crisis is “about [poor white people] reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible,” and about “[t]oo many young men immune to hard work…[and] good jobs impossible to fill.” Vance’s book is a memoir about his family, and how they delivered him from the “Appalachian” work ethic, or lack thereof. His conclusion to this problem was to escape. Cam, what’s your take on the book?
Cam: Like many, I personally became aware of Vance and his book in 2016, not long after its release, and after reading several critical reviews of the book, decided to try and give it a whirl myself. I'll admit: I didn't get very far. I found it strange that this Yale grad from Ohio was being coronated as some kind of Appalachia whisperer, especially when his book was so contemptuous of the region. It doesn't take very long in the book before Vance launches into screeds about welfare and addiction, and as someone who grew up in Appalachia, I began to recognize a troubling pattern. Vance himself is basically no different from dozens of men I have met here: men who hate the place they find themselves in, who are just waiting around for their opportunity to strike it big and put Appalachia in their rear-view. For most of these men, this is only a dream, one that will never be realized due to structures and systematic issues that Vance wants to pretend don't exist. Vance was lucky, and was able to realize this dream of his, but that does not at all make him different than those who aren’t. His unremarkability burns straight through it. Ash, what do you make of the source material?
Ash: For me, the bottom line is that Vance wears blinders. You’re right that Vance is contemptuous of the region – in fact, he blames Appalachia for its own issues, saying “[t]here is no government that can fix these problems for us…We created them, and only we can fix them.” He not only ignores Appalachia’s historically systemic issues – the way that big businesses and now pharmaceutical companies have for years stripped every ounce of wealth from the region – but he also blames the individuals living in the region for their fate. At the end of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance recalls a recurring nightmare where his beloved Mamaw and his older sister repeatedly abandon him to a monster which is stalking him. Each time they both escape, leaving him behind, full of terror. This irony is what’s at the heart of Hillbilly Elegy for me – that despite the “Appalachian honor code” Vance constantly refers to, in waking life, he was the one that escaped and left his family behind.
Cam: Transitioning to the film itself, let's talk about it briefly removed from the context of its source material – because the film has lots of issues on its own. For starters, we both had issues with the script, which tries and fails to emulate a two-pronged narrative: one taking place in the present, with an adult J.D. Vance stressing out and having to return home (which, I cannot stress enough, is Ohio), and one taking place in the past, with a young J.D. Vance learning to hate the place and people around him.
It's interesting to me that the movie attempts this and does it so clumsily (at times the film's use of flashback is almost comical) when we are so close to the release of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, which deploys the same structure very effectively. Instead of weaving these two timelines together in a slowly revelatory and satisfying way, they seem to sort of co-exist, with little from either informing much about the other. Aside from the structural issues, we also see some strange camera work. There is a lot of shaky handheld footage here and almost none of it has any relevance to the plot. The direction and mood are overly melodramatic, and the acting by both Adams and Glenn Close (something lots of people seem to really enjoy) borders on parody for me at times. I don't believe at any point that these are real people – except for Haley Bennett, who plays Vance's sister. Adams, through the fault of the script, is less a person and more a one-woman tornado of despair, and she is portrayed so unsympathetically that, perhaps by design, the brief moment that attempts to get you to care about her feels extremely dry.
Excerpts from the book are worked into the film and are placed alongside some truly baffling imagery. Near the beginning, we are given a narration from Vance about the hills his grandparents are from, and he says, "your people always have your back." However, this is very oddly put alongside a scene where people from the hills are picking on him, and other people from the hills have to step in and save him (with some adult-to-child violence thrown in for good measure). It leads me to think: who does J.D. even think "his people" are? Probably not the kids picking on him. But aren't they from the hills? I don't think Vance really knows, and I don't think Howard does either.
Ash: You mention above an important line: “Your people always have your back.” While I understood that these older men were Vance’s family – who he defined as his people in that moment – it becomes clear to me by the end of the film that this statement just isn’t true. J.D. Vance didn’t have his family’s back when they needed him most. His sister begs him to come home when his own mother has overdosed on heroin. Young J.D. points his finger in his mother and Mamaw’s faces and tells them both they’re terrible mothers. He suggests to his sister that they abandon his mother and let her die (“if that’s what she wants”), and in the end, he passes responsibility on her yet again to drive back to Connecticut.
The film defines “upward mobility” as escaping Appalachia. In the beginning of the film, when Vance and his family leave their summer vacation in Kentucky for Ohio, Vance wonders why they couldn’t just stay there forever, but through voiceover explains that his grandparents escaped to Ohio for a better life, and more opportunity. His escape to Yale is an extension of this – except, of course, the big difference being that he wrote a memoir to condemn the region his family is originally from.
The film’s structure, to me, was the biggest formal failure, but the writing is also appalling. The beginning of the film prepares the audience for a movie about family and the Appalachian region. In the middle of the film, however, I had to stop to ask myself what movie I was watching, because Hillbilly Elegy is not about either of those things. It’s clear that J.D. Vance is not only the protagonist of this movie, but – at least he must believe – he is the protagonist of life as he knows it. This movie felt like an attempt to make me feel sympathy and pity for someone who had a tough time “growing up Appalachian” though he didn’t even grow up in my region, though he is white, a man, heterosexual, and cisgender. J.D. Vance has everything that a person could have going for him, except being born to a poor mother who struggled with substance abuse.
I believe it’s now appropriate to perhaps shock the audience by saying that Appalachia is more than just poor white people. It’s poor Black people, poor Indigenous people, poor immigrants, and poor LGBTQ+ people – and many never leave. In fact, the answer to the Appalachian “problem,” as J.D. Vance puts it, is not to leave. There are groups like STAY Project, which fight for economically and environmentally stable Appalachian communities which support the diverse population, while Vance advocates for yet more capitalistic plundering of the region.
Cam: Also worth mentioning is that Vance himself is a venture capitalist, who has made quite a bit of money through investing and now directly from both his book and the film – yet how much of that do we see reinvested into the communities he’s talking about? There have been gestures toward drawing investors to “his home” and places like it, but most of these vague efforts seemed to have fizzled.
Ash: Even leaving J.D.’s own responsibility to the region aside, this movie isn’t even true to Appalachia. What might seem like a small complaint to some is a big issue of believability for those in the Appalachian region: the accents spoken by the actors are off, and sometimes even mismatched. Ron Rash, an Appalachian writer from Chester County, North Carolina, said earlier this year of Hollywood portrayals of Appalachia, “No one ever gets the accents right,” and Hillbilly Elegy is no exception. Accents from the Appalachian region are distinctly different from that of “the south” generally, and can even differ slightly from different communities within Appalachia. Gabriel Basso, who plays grown J.D. Vance, clearly trained himself on certain words, but his midwestern speech rings though. Adams and Close don’t even bother to match each other’s accents.
The movie begins in Jackson, Kentucky, and once Vance and his family leaves, the narrative never returns. We spend the rest of the film between Ohio, where Vance grew up, and Yale, where he tries to make a name for himself. The adaptation focuses on, if anything, Vance’s personal “upward mobility” and search of the American Dream. The story hinges on a moment when Vance shares a single Meals-on-Wheels dinner with his Mamaw. After this dinner, where Mamaw admits she can’t afford her medication anymore, there’s a montage of young J.D. typing on a calculator, taking out the trash, putting cans of soda on a shelf. He starts working at a grocery store. He gets a good grade in Algebra class. Next thing you know, he’s on his way to Yale, and he’s not looking back. While this in and of itself is a political statement – that this young white man was able to pull himself up by his bootstraps, – the movie erases much of the politics of the source material, despite ample opportunity to dive into those questions.
Cam: I’m glad you bring up those last couple of points, as it indicates why exactly this doesn’t work as an adaptation. Even a cursory glance at the source material shows that there is room to create something here. There are slim threads that could have been pulled into something honest and raw. Instead, Ron Howard decided to simply sand off the unseemly edges for the film adaptation rather than tackle them straight on. I suppose it has something to do with Vance’s own involvement with the film (he is listed as executive producer), but because the film never wants to be anything aside from fluffy, melodramatic Oscar bait, we fly right past so much missed opportunity. No attention is paid whatsoever to Vance’s social position, and parts where he is favored (over people more marginalized than him, specifically the women in his own family) it is portrayed as righteous.
At a certain point in the film, Vance has to navigate a rather labyrinthine and difficult situation regarding healthcare for his mother, and he goes about this by leveraging what little privilege he is able to muster (we are, after all, talking about a clean-cut white guy) and absolutely bulls through what he sees as the problem: the policy-obsessed workers in his way. In one particularly notable scene, he pulls this card on a black woman who works as the director of a rehab facility, basically saying, “I’m not gonna leave until you give my mom a bed.” Without any context at all, it is plain to see that while Vance sees this as a noble stand against a system that doesn’t care, but it comes across as extremely petulant and entitled. This is only made worse by the fact that reading his own words shows that Vance loves private encroachment on public services like healthcare, with these horrible experiences doing nothing but strengthening his resolve. This is only one of several parts in the film that had my partner Jessica (who bravely watched this along with me) saying “Wait, this guy’s a Republican??”
If the filmmakers were interested at all in creating something incisive and worthwhile, they could have leveraged this into a film about why people like Vance turn out the way they do, and why regional resentment breeds in people who feel entitled to be at the top because of their supposed hard work. Howard could have examined how JD Vance is not upset at systemic injustice, or generational poverty, or how the women in his life had no other lot in life than to be stepping stones or obstacles in his career path, but instead, he is merely upset that he was denied his success for so long.
We don’t get anything about how the systems we have in place in Appalachia (and America broadly) intentionally balkanize marginalized people so that they end up seeing each other as enemies. We don’t get even a passing glance at the marginal communities you mentioned above and how bridges can (and often are!) built between them. Instead, we get a shoddily made, poorly acted, absent minded 2-hour slog through nonsense, and we are supposed to come out the other side of that clapping and cheering for Mr. Big Special Boy J.D. Vance. Is it any wonder that people like Ben Shapiro are coming to the plate for this movie?
Ash: The conclusion of the book presents a nearly perfect picture of Vance’s worldview. Vance describes himself Christmas shopping for an Adopt-a-Child-type charity event. “I managed to find fault with nearly every [gift] suggestion,” he states. “Pajamas? Poor people don’t wear pajamas.” It seems as though Vance takes the attitude that if he didn’t have it as a child, no one should. The now-millionaire couldn’t buy a child in need pajamas because he slept in his underwear as a boy. Vance isn’t concerned about Appalachia. He isn’t concerned about his sister or his mother. He is most concerned about feeling sorry for himself. He wrote Hillbilly Elegy not so that people could “understand the American Dream,” but so that he could pat himself on the back. And even more than the book, the movie Hillbilly Elegy is not about Appalachia, is not about injustice. It is not even about a family. Hillbilly Elegy is about poor J.D. Vance, a white boy who had to work hard.
Cam: Even then, it is not a particularly good or well-realized version of that. Bogged down by its source material, and cornered by its own toothless script and direction, this film manages to say nothing, while simultaneously allowing Vance himself to slide through unscathed and rehabilitated into larger cultural conversations. Vance wants to have his cake and eat it too, showing nothing but utter contempt for the regions he grew up in, while still wanting recognition for his upbringing as a poor kid from Appalachia, deploying signals like his accent and trying with all his might to weave that into some sort of faux-oppression that he very bravely overcame. Howard, with his sanitized approach, even gives him some cover for doing so. The most egregious thing about the book, and now the film as well, is that the very real oppression that people in Appalachia face daily is now swept away and replaced with a tiny, unimportant personal story.
