Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ on Netflix Stars Glenn Close, Amy Adams In Ron Howard’s Appalachian Drama

Hillbilly Elegy is Netflix’s least subtle Oscar-bait film of the year. Directed by Ron Howard with a screenplay by Vanessa Taylor, this based-on-true-story drama finds stars Amy Adams and Glenn Close trying to outdo each other as the mother and grandmother of J.D Vance, a future Yale law student who grew up in a poor family from Middletown, Ohio. Vance’s 2016 memoir became a fascination among media experts, following President Trump’s election, but Howard’s adaptation is scrubbed clean of the book’s politics. All that is left behind is a pile of clichés.

HILLBILLY ELEGY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We meet J.D Vance as a young boy (played by Owen Asztalos) visiting with his extended family in Kentucky in “the year of our Lord, 1997.” J.D.’s tough-as-nails grandmother, who he calls Mamaw (Glenn Close), left town for Middleview, Ohio when she was just 13 years old and pregnant with J.D.’s mother, Bev (Amy Adams). Don’t waste time trying to figure out if the math of Close and Adam’s ages works there—it doesn’t.

We flash forward 14 years later. J.D., now played by Gabriel Basso, is a second-year law student at Yale University with a girlfriend named Usha (Freida Pinto) and an insufficient financial aid package. His only hope of staying in the program is a fancy summer associate job at a law firm. Good news: He has a callback interview. Bad news: His sister Lindsay (Haley Bennet) calls to tell him that his mom is in the hospital after overdosing on heroin.

Even though he has an interview the next morning, J.D. drives back to Middleview to help his sister take care of their mom. In the meantime, we learn via flashback about Bev’s addiction journey, and the impact it had on J.D.’s childhood. After a few too many incidents—including one where J.D. ran from his mom in terror after she endangered both of their lives—J.D. moves in with Mamaw, who whips him into shape using her tried-and-true parenting technique: verbal abuse.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: While biking around town, a young J.D. passes a movie theater. The marquee is advertising, in peeling letters, Forrest Gump—another clichéd film about white southern culture. Perhaps Howard may see his film as a slightly more modern version of Robert Zemeckis’s Oscar-winning film, but one key difference is that Forrest Gump, however cheesy, is a movie about an inherently interesting person.

Performance Worth Watching: Close and Adams are clearly striving for their Oscars—Adams with wailing and thrashing, and Close with scowls and grumbled obscenities. Both are pros who do deserve the Academy Award, but not for this movie. The only true stand-out is Bennett as Lindsay Vance. J.D. doesn’t consider how their mom’s abusive boyfriends might be harder on his sister than him, but a few meaningful looks of apprehensive and terror from Bennett speak volumes. She’s not given the dialogue to properly tell Lindsay’s story, but Bennett manages to hint at a darker, more interesting movie from Lindsay’s POV all the same.

Memorable Dialogue: J.D. angrily snapping “We don’t use that term,” when someone at his fancy lawyer dinner says the word “redneck” feels like it has meme potential.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: It’s no doubt annoying to some when critics gang up on a movie to be their annual punching bag, but Hillbilly Elegy just makes it so easy. It is, quite simply, a bad movie. It’s not bad in the can’t-look-away-from-this-bizarre-trainwreck way that Cats (2019) was bad. It’s bad in a boring, fall-asleep-within-the-first-twenty-minutes way. I have a higher tolerance for clichés than many—for instance, I adored Hulu’s by-the-book rom-com Happiest Season—but Howard’s adaption piles them on until even someone who had never seen a movie before would sense banality. J.D. saves an injured turtle. J.D. doesn’t know which fork to use at a fancy lawyer dinner. J.D.’s card gets declined at the gas station. The drama is over-orchestrated. The slo-mo is overused.

Perhaps Howard and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor aren’t entirely to blame, as many of these tired tropes are pulled verbatim from Vance’s book. But why bother to adapt it, then? As others have pointed out, the political musings from the real-life Vance on why his white working-class friends hate Obama have been self-consciously scrubbed from the film, likely because everyone involved knew how polarizing that would be. All that’s left is a not very interesting story about a man who doesn’t come off looking particularly good. In the end, Vance leaves his drug-addled mother crying in a hotel room for his overworked, underpaid sister to deal with. Cue the inspirational “American Dream” music and the “Where are they now?” credit sequence.

If Hillbilly Elegy was intended as a vessel for Oscar-bait reels from Close and Adams, it fails there, too. Sure, they are both seasoned professionals and it shows—Close especially, with some liberal help from the make-up department—but it’s hard to feel moved by performances attached to flat, one-note characters. Mamaw growls and swears; Bev cries and screams. Rinse and repeat. The real people they are based on are no doubt far more complex, but Hillbilly Elegy has no interest in peeling back the layers. Bennett and Asztalos, as Lindsay and Young J.D. respectively, both bring impressive nuance to their characters despite the cheesy dialogue—just enough to make you wish the movie were lead by them instead of Basso, Adams, and Close.

To Howard’s credit, there are few tense scenes that captured my interest—like a young J.D. fleeing his mother after she assaults him in the car, smartly filmed devoid of music (for once) for maximum suspense. But those few minutes of excitement can’t hide the fact that Hillbilly Elegy ends with nothing meaningful to say about the family we just spent two hours with. Prominent conservatives will accuse critics of “liberal bias” over the next few weeks. But even if it were possible to separate the subject material from a film, Hillbilly Elegy would still come up mediocre. It’s not the worst movie of the year. It’s not eye-gouging-ly terrible. It’s just bad.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Unless you’re one of the hard-working meme-makers who is willing to sacrifice two hours of your day for our internet giggles—thank you for your service—Hillbilly Elegy is a waste of time.

Watch Hillbilly Elegy on Netflix