Hillbilly Elegy (2020)

Directed by: Ron Howard | 116 minutes | drama | Actors: Haley Bennett, Amy Adams, Glenn Close, Freida Pinto, Gabriel Basso, Sunny Mabrey, Bo Hopkins, Stephen Kunken, Dylan Gage, William Mark McCullough, Owen Asztalos, Tierney Smith

‘Hillbilly Elegy’ is a well-acted, if not entirely convincing, drama about young college student JD Vance who tries to break free from his poor Ohio family, only to find that family ties can’t be broken easily.

The film actually divides the story into two parts: the present day when Vance (played by Gabriel Basso) is a law student at the prestigious Yale University – and lengthy flashback scenes to his childhood in the impoverished town of Middletown, Ohio with his dysfunctional family. . The Vances are originally from Kentucky, but his grandma and grandpa leave there after his grandma got pregnant when she was 13.

At the beginning of the film, Vance has one goal: to arrange a summer internship at a reputable law firm that brings him $30,000 and allows him to be close to his girlfriend Usha (Freida Pinto). Then he gets a call from his older sister Lyndsey (Haley Bennett). Their mother Beverly (Amy Adams) has taken a heroin overdose and is in the hospital. Torn by doubt because he doesn’t want to screw up his latest job interview, Vance decides to move back from Connecticut to Ohio to take care of his mother.

The flashbacks color the events further and further: how young JD (Owen Asztalos) struggles with Beverly’s behavior and how he finds support in his grandmother, whom he calls Mamaw and is played by an almost unrecognizable Glenn Close. She lives in the same street. Alone, though, because Grandpa Papaw (Bo Hoskins) also has his own house down the street. It turns out that not only does Beverly have problems, but that everyone has suffered psychological damage to a greater or lesser extent.

‘Hillbilly Elegy’ is based on the book of the same name that JD Vance wrote in 2016, in which he also made broader connections based on his own experiences about the position of the poor white underclass in the United States. It caused a lot of discussion, especially after Donald Trump surprisingly won the presidential election later that year. It was the people of the same background as Vance who now massively voted for the Republican party. Conservatives, in particular, took advantage of Vance’s message that it was not just the economic conditions that caused generations of people living on the brink of poverty, alcoholism, drug use and domestic violence, but that the social decline was partly due to their own culture and attitude to life. The circumstances versus personal responsibility.

Incidentally, the film does not delve that deeply into the political implications of families like JD Vance’s. Director Ron Howard mainly makes it a family drama, which relies heavily on the rock-solid acting performances of Glenn Close and Amy Adams. Although he can’t help that in terms of acting, Basso’s JD Vance is a bit of a colorless figure in the middle of all the verbal (and sometimes physical) violence. The same goes for Pinto, who can only communicate with her boyfriend by phone except for two short scenes.

The real fireworks come from the two women who play the main roles. First of all, Glenn Close, who is allowed to shuffle through the screen in a wide T-shirt with enormous glasses under a curly wig, almost always with a burning cigarette butt in her mouth. Her Mamaw is a surrogate mother for JD, but it turns out that beneath the witticisms and loving approach of her young grandson, there is also a complicated woman who certainly doesn’t go unnoticed about how her daughter has turned out. And then, of course, Amy Adams, who puts on a tour-de-force as the tormented Beverly, who is discharged as a nurse after swallowing a patient’s pills, enters into numerous short-lived relationships, and herself the demons of the horrors of her own childhood. carries. JD also finds out that his mother is in turn a product of her upbringing – in a nasty scene during Christmas. The impact of that scene is enjoyed because it almost seems like a parody. That is the trick of the scenario: it sometimes borders on the stereotypical, as if a checklist has been completed. It may have all really happened that way, but it doesn’t really feel that way.

During the credits, the film first shows stills and then the real home video footage of the Vance family. Then you’ll notice how astonishingly close the cast (especially Close) resembles the people they portray.