by Conan Simmons – June 25, 2021 – 10:19 pm
If you’ve ever watched a slow moving, boring, dull, worthless movie that is a complete waste of time you either sat through an Andy Milligan movie or ‘Hillbilly Elegy’, the over-budgeted ($45 million) faux sob story of J.D. Vance based on his 2016 memoir that is a New York Times bestseller proving just how easy it is to get on the New York Times bestseller list.
Who is J.D. Vance and why is there a biopic about him?
The movie opens with J.D. Vance as a young boy helping an injured tortoise by a creek as a group of local boys in a backwoods part of Kentucky bully him. This scene is obviously a horribly misguided ploy to beg for audience sympathy for a main character.
Flashing forward we find J.D. Vance grown up, played by Gabriel Basso, attending a big fancy dinner party at the University of Yale where he is surrounded by rich elitists that make him feel very self-conscious about not knowing which side of the plate the silverware goes on. In desperation he excuses himself so he can call his girlfriend, played by Freida Pinto, so she can explain to him about the forks and spoons.
Vance soon receives a phone call from his family, now living in Ohio, informing him of his mothers’ out of control drug addiction. The rest of the movie is Vance back in Ohio being frustrated in his efforts to help his mother off her opioid addiction interspersed with flashbacks to him as a boy being raised by his Grandmother, played by Glenn Close, whose only real notable moment is yet another flashback to when Vance’s mother witnessed the Grandmother setting fire to her sleeping husband, played by Bo Hopkins. Vance does have some assistance from his sister, played by Haley Bennett, which does nothing to advance the plot.
When the film is not focused on flashbacks the only dramatic conflict is the completely predictable “will he or won’t he” leave the poor, drug addicted state of Ohio and return to the coastal elite University of Yale where he’s surrounded by rich, influential people and a beautiful girlfriend.
‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was nominated for two Academy Awards, for Hair and Makeup of which the craft team does a capable job, and Best Supporting Actress for Glenn Close, which given that this is the easiest role of her career of course a high caliber actress of her stature is going to get nominated. Amy Adams, who plays Vance’s drug addicted mother, earned a Golden Globe nomination, but then the Golden Globes has a long history of nominating people based on how publicly well-known they are.
The most confounding thing about ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ is it’s a movie about someone’s life that is completely uninteresting. How even a memoir of an uneventful life could become a bestseller is a mystery unto itself, I guess people will read anything (much like I watched this movie). Seriously, my life is far more interesting than what is portrayed in ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ but it still wouldn’t make for a big budget Hollywood movie.
The subject matter of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ is more suited to a student filmmaker’s thesis film, not the efforts of established top industry players.
Ron Howard’s production company bought the rights to make a movie from the book in 2017 and Netflix jumped at the chance to work with Ron Howard as did all the cast and crew that worked on this.
The saddest bit is Freida Pinto, who lit up the screen in the Oscar winning ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ and ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’, is completely wasted here as all her scenes are of her alone in an apartment talking on the phone to the often helpless J.D. Vance. Pinto’s character is nowhere near developed enough to know who she is and essentially fills the role of the token person of color. But, at least she got to work with Ron Howard?
The real story is how J.D. Vance hoodwinked Hollywood into taking his third-rate wannabe Horatio Alger story of rags-to-riches American Dream and turning it into a big budget movie. He’s clearly just a shyster exploiting the very real opioid crises that gripped the United States for years and parlaying that into his own political aspirations. By parading out the drug addicted and suffering poor Vance hopes to curry favor thinking people will believe his stereotypical, blue-collar, poverty background and not focus on his Yale education or his involvement with multi-billionaires Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal, and Eric Schmidt, once CEO of Google.
In short, ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ can be summed up as redneck exploitation pretending to be prestige.