American audiences are gluttons for punishment. That’s the only logical explanation for the repeated tendency to be warned, at great volume, that a piece of pop culture is abysmally terrible—and then flock to it anyway and make it bafflingly popular.
The latest example is the surge in popularity of the Netflix film Hillbilly Elegy, the 2020 cinematic abomination—er, excuse me… adaptation—of J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir.
Ron Howard’s film starred Gabriel Basso as Vance, a former Marine and Yale Law student, and Glenn Close and Amy Adams as his “Mamaw” and mother, whose addiction issues forces Vance to return to his Appalachia hometown and wrestle with his roots, just as he was trying to escape them.
Politics aside—and the politics are bad!—Hillbilly Elegy is an abysmal film, a blight on each of its stars’ and filmmakers’ careers.
This past week, it’s been climbing the ranks of Netflix’s most watched movies. At the time I’m writing this, it’s at No. 2 on the streamer’s chart, sandwiched in between the animated musical Trolls Band Together and Fifty Shades Freed, the final installment in the S&M “mommy porn” franchise. (I truly can’t think of a better, if woefully depressing, summation of American culture than that Top 3.)
If we’re being generous, the spike in interest in the film could be justified as a curiosity about a person who just became one of the most consequential figures in our country—and our lives. OK… that is actually a completely worthwhile, and perhaps even responsible, reason to seek out the project.
Whether people are hitting play on Hillbilly Elegy to pledge support for the newest member of the MAGA presidential ticket or to simply find out what the hell the deal is with this already polarizing figure who just became a lightning rod in an unprecedented storm, everyone is about to discover the same truth. (A rare moment of unity for our divided country!) That revelation: This movie is just as bad as everyone said it was.
The problem with Hillbilly Elegy, the film (we won’t even get into the book), is that it wasn’t even good enough to merit the raging discourse that it caused four years ago.
Cynically released in the weeks following a fraught election, the expectation was that the film would offer some perspective to a fractured America on those who live in a region of the country that is routinely dismissed. Optimistically, the movie might even rouse enough humanity to add clarity to the question, following Donald Trump’s victory, of “How did we get here?”
But Hillbilly Elegy was shockingly superficial, with Howard zooming past his sweet spot for generating compassion and crashing into an emotionally manipulative fiasco. The performances from Close and Adams amounted to borderline offensive Appalachia drag: a conflagration of garish wigs, labored accents, and histrionic speechifying.
Even people from the region decried how the film depicts them, joining critics in their dismay over its abject lack of empathy.
“Hillbilly Elegy isn’t interested in the systems that create poverty and addiction and ignorance; it just wants to pretend that one straight white guy’s ability to rise above his surroundings means that there’s no excuse for everyone else not to have done so as well,” wrote The Wrap’s Alonso Duralde in his review.
(L-R) Haley Bennett, Gabriel Basso, and Amy Adams.
Lacey Terrell/Netflix“Directed by Ron Howard and denuded of any meaningful politics to speak of, Hillbilly Elegy is an extended Oscar-clip montage in search of a larger purpose, an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang. “These characters are trapped... in generational cycles of dysfunction, deprivation and hopelessness. Those patterns are also cultural and structural, though unlike its source material, Hillbilly Elegy seems curiously uninterested in the underlying causes, let alone the possible solutions.”
Of course, those pans were met with dismissal from some rural Americans who felt the reviews were classist cannonballs flung at them from coastal ivory towers. (One user of what was then Twitter even commented on each critic’s reviews “calling them out” as being from Los Angeles or New York. Their page no longer exists.)
When I interviewed Howard in 2022, he told me he was “surprised” by the backlash the film received: “Audience reactions were good. Even people from the region, in the test audiences, understood it and appreciated it for the level of authenticity that we achieved and which we were going for. With that film, as you well know, reviewers and others were tougher on it. And they brought whatever filter they were looking at it through. The movie frustrated them in certain ways.”
Hillbilly Elegy sparked a class war that became more interesting than the movie itself. And that was four years ago, when Vance was nothing more than a seemingly well-intentioned writer. Now that he’s Donald Trump’s running mate, I respect the discourse over the resurgent movie to resemble less the fiery discussion that it incited four years ago, and something more akin to a debate version of that video where all of San Diego’s Fourth of July fireworks went off at once. And all over a movie that is, objectively, trash!
There’s a report that the critical thrashing that the film received from liberals radicalized Vance, the “last straw” that saw him going from a “moderate Never Trumper to insane MAGA Trumper.”
So in addition to offering my sincere condolences to anyone who felt moved to watch Hillbilly Elegy because of Vance’s recent job promotion, I guess what I want to say is sorry. I guess this is all my fault.
