J.D., who is apparently smart enough to hop-skip-jump into Yale Law (the movie barely covers his college career), is not smart enough to know that literally everything he does on his dramatic trip back to Ohio could just as easily be accomplished with a couple of phone calls - and he would have been significantly less fucked and significantly less passive-aggressively bitchy about it. But really, a lot of poor people are great with money, and Hillbilly Elegy not knowing that is just one of the zillion ways it sucks.) The only people who think poor people are surprised when they run out of money are people who think poor people are poor because they’re bad with money. In reality, when you’re poor, you know every cent you have in the bank, down to the last penny, and you have already calculated exactly how much gas you can put in your car and how far that gas will get you before you run out of money. (As an aside, you can tell when privileged rich people who’ve never been poor write screenplays about being poor, because they always include scenes where the poor person’s credit card is awkwardly declined, as J.D.’s is when he tries to buy gas during his road trip. Yet Hillbilly Elegy rewards him over and over again by framing him as the calmest, most reasonable person in the room despite all evidence to the contrary - like when he tried to wedge his teenage body under a small coffee table or decided on a whim, without telling anybody, to make a 20-hour round trip drive from Yale to Ohio to see his convalescing mother the day before a job interview that supposedly represented his only chance to avoid being unable to pay his college tuition. He’s unfunny, abrasive, self-righteous, constantly selfish, and completely clueless. is easily the most loathsome protagonist since Holden Caulfield. Haley Bennett, Glenn Close, and Owen Asztalos in Hillbilly Elegy. Vance, spent most of the film treating “his people” like shit. For example, I honestly spent the whole movie wondering why the opening leaned so heavily on the narrator’s childhood summers in Kentucky - his seminal time spent with “my people,” a phrase he said over and over again like Moses freeing the Israelites - even though we never returned to Kentucky or his extended family again. I hesitate to even call them subplots since that suggests a plot arc to begin with. I wasn’t prepared for this film’s sheer quixotic nothingness.Īpart from the extremely lazy way the film shorthands its characters through regional and class stereotypes, Hillbilly Elegy is an incoherent, meandering, misogynistic tangle of vanishing subplots and vague ideas. But like Alissa said, I was mostly prepared for that. Every scene of Hillbilly Elegy is designed to mix the laziest form of pathos with the laziest form of social commentary and present it with the most condescending tone of profundity, and y’all, I could have been rewatching Winter’s Bone instead of this patronizing mush.
What did you think as you watched it? And what do you think happened here?Īja: What didn’t I think? As a hillbilly born and raised (in rural west Tennessee), I’m very used to seeing rural American life painted with broad strokes.
When it ended I just kind of stared at the screen, amazed that I’d just seen the worst movie of the last few years at least, and that it had so much well-meaning talent attached to it, from director Ron Howard to writer Vanessa Taylor to stars Glenn Close and Amy Adams. Or confusing! As I noted in my review, the movie is both constantly explosive - people scream, rage, get literally set on fire - and shockingly dull. Hollywood movies rarely manage to represent anyone with an accent and a pickup truck as less than a caricature.īut I wasn’t expecting it to be so. Having seen the trailer and the posters, I expected it to be condescending toward its characters. Everything about Netflix’s Hillbilly Elegy movie is awfulĪlissa Wilkinson: Aja, Emily, I think we may have all had the same reaction to Hillbilly Elegy as we watched it - confusion followed by bafflement, then horror, then something like fury.
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