Premise: A young man attending Yale law school attempts to interview for a job and prevent the problems from his poor life growing up from getting in the way.
I missed the wave of popularity of this book back in 2016. Apparently, it was brought into the greater discussion of "Trump's America" as a sort of roadmap to understand his appeal. I'm going to mostly avoid that kind of angle or comparison though, since I don't really get it or care.
This is a bad movie. It's not a badly made movie. Ron Howard directed it and his ability to make something watchable is almost unconscious at this point. I'm more mixed on the acting in the movie, but no one embarrasses themselves in this (OK, maybe Amy Adams). Even the writing on a structural level kind of works, moving between the two timelines. No, Hillbilly Elegy is a bad movie because I really don't know what the point of it is.
It's based on a memoir by J.D. Vance and tells the story of how he went from a childhood filled with poverty and drugs to being in Yale Law School. Vance comes from "Hillbilly royalty" in Kentucky, although he lives in more of an Ohio factory town. (So, is he really a hillybilly?) His mom is a drug addict with a temper. His grandmother is fiery as well but in more of a chaotic good way. Anyway, as a kid, we see Vance get into all sorts of trouble and endure hardships before his grandmother finally gets him on track. In the future portion, Vance is barely making ends meet at Yale, constantly worried that he'll use the wrong fork at social gatherings. He gets pulled away back home because his mom has another OD, and he has to choose between staying home to get his mom more help or returning to Yale for an important interview.
I just plain don't care about Vance's journey though. Not on a philosophical level. I don't care on a cinematic level. I think it's supposed to be an inspirational story about overcoming the hardships in your life. Or maybe it's supposed to be about remembering where you came from. Either way, I don't buy it. Most of Vance's childhood is him getting high and getting into trouble while occasionally asking to watch C-SPAN in hilarious attempts to show "See, he's actually really smart". Then it skips over when he joins the Marines then goes to Ohio State for undergrad. That is a real disservice to his story, because where we leave off with him as a kid gives no indication of how he actually got to Yale. Sure, there's a little montage of him doing more chores and starting to get better grades, but that's about it. So ironically, his true story about overcoming hardship ends up in the movie looking like another story of a white guy who got to make mistakes every step of the way and still make it to the Ivy League.
I found myself thinking about Malcolm in the Middle a lot while watching this. It's a similar kind of story about a poor or working-class kid who overcomes his situation. The key difference is that that show never looked down on the family the way Hillbilly Elegy looks down on everyone in Vance's life. It's a patronizing movie. Like the insistence that Vance's mother was actually really smart. It's a lot of telling and no showing that in the movie. In another Amy Adams movie about "refined city folk" going home, Junebug, I talk about the inherent problem of movies about people returning to their hometowns. It's really hard to make a movie like this that isn't gawking, which is why they don't work.
There wasn't much to like about this movie. I'll be surprised if it really catches on with any major audience. The acting is too exaggerated. Too much is unintentionally funny (the kid playing young Vance has no idea how to bump into things in a believable way). I don't get the point of the story or like the main character very much. Coming away from the movie, I have no idea why anyone involved wanted to make this.
Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend
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