Hollywood making a movie about Middle America bumkins seems like a doomed idea from the start. This is a movie that hides behind a mediocre book, and a worse script by throwing great directing/actors at the story in hopes to make the movie some sort of introspective Oscar Bait. But that desire for a grand drama only exacerbates the story problems, and proves Ron Howard has lost his fastball when picking projects. Or maybe that Netflix money was too tempting: dude been cashing big money checks recently.
JD (Gabriel Basso) is a law student at Yale, practicing interviewing for summer internships with his girlfirend Usha (Freida Pinto). At a dinner the night before interview day, JD gets a call from his sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett): their mother Bev (Amy Adams) has relapsed, and she needs JD to take care of her for at least a night since she has a giant family and cannot. On the drive from New England to Middletown Ohio, JD reflects on his upbringing with Emily, Bev, and his grandmother Mamaw (Glenn Close) and how he got where he is today.
Ron Howard and writer Vanessa Taylor write this movie like they did a Google search of “Problems with Middle America” and put everything they could find into the story. Hillbilly Elegy eschews plot or characters for a shock and awe bombardment from Bev. I counted at least 5 felonies committed. Poor JD has an insane day back home, yikes. The movie tries to cover this up by casting the great Amy Adams in the role, but there are limits to her greatness, as she simply gets sucked into the black hole of plot devices and repeatedly unredeemable character choices. A smarter movie would tie Bev’s predicament to the general decay of Middle America by unfeeling politicians, corporations, or religious figures. Nope, this movie makes Bev so unlikable that we question JD and Lindsay for enabling such bad behavior, and use Bev as a plot device for Mamaw to learn from.
Because JD puts himself at the center of the story, we’re forced to see the story through his eyes. I would argue that JD and Bev are probably the two worst characters to build the story around, since they aren’t really interesting in any way. I found myself gravitating to Haley Bennett and Glenn Close instead. Bennett is wasted in this movie, but her Lindsay is a reincarnation of Memaw, heroically holding the family bonds together despite the destructions that certain bonds cause to everyone. There could have been a great story in there about Lindsay: a dreamer who can’t escape her life of lost chances her brother got, or a rock solid matriarch willing her family to stay together because it makes her happy, but JD cares so little about his sister that she’s thrown to the side cruelly. Glenn Close’s Memaw, deservedly so, gets the best arc, overcoming her limitations to take a stand for the people she loves. I knew more than a few grandmothers like Memaw, hard as nails but filled with depths of love underneath. It’s a decent performance for nothing. Also, props to the makeup department for making Close look eerily similar to JD’s Memaw. It freaked me out for a hot sec.
Hillbilly Elegy could have been what Ron Howard, Amy Adams, and Glenn Close wanted it to be, but perhaps there’s not as much there as it seems. Or, maybe the movie shouldn’t have been a movie at all, but instead a Midwestern play somewhere. You can plagiarize the hell out of August: Osage County and steal great lines from that. I can see Memaw saying “Eat the fish bitch!” to JD like Julia Roberts did to Meryl Streep in Osage County. Who knows? At least that play idea couldn’t be worse than the nonsense Netflix tried to Oscar bait and switch with.