Hillbilly Elegy is Awful
Hillbilly Elegy. Courtesy of Netflix.
The first few moments of Hillbilly Elegy filled me with hope - I mostly like Ron Howard’s stuff, and it seemed like it was going to be a throwback to those classic 1980s coming of age films like Stand By Me, where some lessons about the beauty and hardness of life come across in equal measure set against the backdrop of a little town serving as a stand-in for Middle America.
But I quickly realized that Hillbilly Elegy was, despite the considerable talents involved in some aspects of it, a very terrible film. It’s bad. The writing is bad. The acting is especially bad. Many of the actors seem to have been cast because of the resemblance they bear to the real life counterparts and decidedly not because of their acting ability (especially the kid playing young JD Vance). The actually good actresses were loaded with make-up and prosthetics to the point where clearly the superficial similarity was more important than considerations of good acting, writing, story-telling, and other things that usually go into watchable movies.
It became clear rather quickly that this movie was not a good movie. But the name JD Vance rang a bell, so I looked him and his dumb book up and then I was even more annoyed that I was watching this terrible movie (if you wonder why I kept hate watching even after it was clear what an absolute pile of shit this film was, it’s because my wife wanted to watch it and I am a firm believer in the solemn matrimonial vow of watching even awful movies with your wife if that’s what she wants).
Why did I hate this movie so much? It’s such a weird mish-mash of the worst of liberal and conservative tropes and stereotypes that it really did my head in. Let’s be clear - Vance’s story is bullshit. He uses this rural backstory in order to frame his own escape from the doldrums as an act of self-made valor, leaving behind his poor, lazy, drug-addicted roots through sheer gumption, the classic delusion of the Conservative Right’s American Dream. In actual reality he went on to work for real-life super villain Peter Thiel, and there has been a lot of well-earned skepticism about the extent of his rural roots and also his convenient elision of the government’s role in helping him, such as the publically funded benefits he got after his military service.
His book was published right before Donald Trump swept to victory in 2016 on a wave of anti-elite populist racism, the existence of which shocked many who thought those forces has long been vanquished, a classic delusion of the Left’s American Dream. People apparently felt that Vance’s story captured and somehow explained this critical juncture in our national nightmare, as he turned the spotlight on a heretofore undiscovered swath of American society - non-college educated rural and urban whites, a mysterious force of nature that Donald Trump, by flinging literally any nonsense at the wall until it stuck, was able to tap and ride all the way into the White House.
So for conservatives, his story is about how hard work and personal attributes can help you break free from the trappings of poverty. For liberals, his story helps to explain how they ended up with a fucking imbecile like Donald Trump for four years, or something like that. But I don’t think his story - especially badly told with overly liberal use of prosthetics - explains anything at all about the United States.
Maybe there was a good film in there somewhere about how some parts of America have been left behind and what that’s done to our political and social landscape. But that ain’t the story that was told. Instead they told the story of a truly unsympathetic character mythologizing himself through a veil of lies, and when it’s all said and done perhaps the greatest acheivement of this movie is that it actually makes you want to go inside the screen so you can punch JD Vance in the face.
