Movie Review: 'Hillbilly Elegy'

Hillbilly Elegy is a deeply overwrought and desperately misguided burlesque of backwoods Americana. An over the top Amy Adams and a downright silly Glenn Close chew scenery as they try to fill the void at the center of a movie based on one of the more dull and forgettable bestselling memoirs I’ve ever read. That Hillbilly Elegy was directed by someone as clever and steeped in Americana as Ron Howard is genuinely baffling.

Hillbilly Elegy stars Gabriel Basso as future lawyer and author, J.D Vance. As a young man in the early 90s, J.D loved to spend time with family in the backwoods of Kentucky. He needed the time away from his actual hometown in Ohio where his mother, Bev (Amy Adams) lives on the same street as her mother, Mamaw (Glenn Close) and just a little further down the street from her daddy, Papaw (Bo Hopkins).

Back in Ohio, Bev struggles with drug addiction and repeatedly choosing the wrong men to sleep with. Her struggles take a toll on young J.D, played as a teenager by Owen Asztelos, who slowly drifts from being a straight edge, A-student to being a burnout like everyone else. That is until his Mamaw steps in and sets him straight with some hillbilly tough love. Glenn Close isn’t an embarrassment in the role of Mamaw but the costume and dialogue would stymie just about anyone.

Amy Adams is one of our finest actors and somehow, Hillbilly Elegy manages to bring out her absolutely worst qualities. Her Bev isn’t so much a troubled addict as she is a purely Hollywood conception of an addict. Hollywood appears to think that drug addiction mostly includes terrible wigs and going without a shower for a few days. Adams wears the wig and flies into rages but nothing she does feels authentic. That is not something I ever thought I would write about Amy Adams but it’s true of her performance in Hillbilly Elegy.

The biggest issue with Hillbilly Elegy however is not the broad caricatures of Close and Adams but the empty vessel at the center of the story. J.D Vance is not an inspiring or compelling character and his story is not nearly as inspiring as the filmmakers think it is. The filmmakers through ineptitude and an accident of intentions, end up equating suffering with eventual success. If Hillbilly Elegy is to be believed, constant, fetishized suffering is the key to future success.

The center of the movie is done no favors by newcomer Gabriel Basso as J.D. Basso is a deeply uninteresting actor by the evidence of Hillbilly Elegy. He comes off as bland and grouchy for the most part and that’s not a very compelling way to portray the lead in any story. Basso is boring and that is somewhat by design and somewhat not by design. J.D as conceived by the filmmakers is an empty vessel so that he can be replaced by us, in the audience.

He’s the star of the movie, but Ron Howard and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor (Hope Springs, Aladdin 2019) specifically design the character to be an audience surrogate. He can’t be too colorful or too much of an individual because if he were, we couldn’t put ourselves in his place. Unfortunately, this renders the character an empty vessel played by an empty vessel and if you’re not inclined to put yourself into the story of Hillbilly Elegy, there isn’t much here for you.

Some critics have called Hillbilly Elegy laughably bad and even called it a worst of the year candidate. I don’t know if it is that bad. It’s certainly not a good movie. The performances include a career worst by Amy Adams but she’s still Amy Adams and her worst day is better than most. Glenn Close is very broad and a little silly but both she and Adams are too competent for this to be the worst of any year. The same goes for Ron Howard and Vanessa Taylor. They may be deeply misguided but both are too competent for Hillbilly Elegy to be memorably terrible.

Hillbilly Elegy debuts on Netflix on November 25th.