I'm not quite sure when people are going to realize that Ron Howard is not a very mindful director but hopefully, this film will be an absolute wake-up call. Hillbilly Elegy is one of the most mindless and insufferable movies made this entire year and one that will, unfortunately, be a favorite among Oscar voters come 2021. This film has no real sense of purpose and no real sense of what it wants to say and goes about this nothingness in the most morally circumventing fashion. Not only was Howard the vastly wrong choice to helm this story but almost every technical piece seems to have worked against him when bringing this story together. The performances are shoddy and cheap, the editing actually breaks up any semblance of pace that was trying to be established, and the cinematography was just plain boring. There are some genuinely good films out there with real stories to tell about growing into success out of a hard life in the South but this movie is definitely not one of them.
J.D. Vance (Gabriel Basso) is a Yale law student who is brought back to his Appalachian hometown when he finds out that his mother Bev (Amy Adams) is in the hospital. After coming back, he is forced to reevaluate and reassess the generational relationships he left behind, including with his grandmother Mamaw (Glenn Close) and sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett). Let's start right off the bat: if there is one thing I thought that this movie could at least execute, it would be competence. Putting the questionable morals and work ethic of Vance aside, there is nothing stopping this film from just being a bland, competent, success story with enough dramatic plot points and performances to warrant a good film. That is what Hillbilly Elegy really could have been and even though we all would have forgotten about it within weeks, Howard and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor take this story in such a dissatisfying direction. Based on the autobiography from Vance himself, this film tries its hardest to be a portrait of American life from the perspective of an Appalachian family and while I'm sure his book covers that to some degree, this film had absolutely nothing to say. Apart from blatantly and cheaply inserted scenes showing how life is like in the South, this movie says nothing about the kind of home Vance grew up in. The writing surrounding his relationship with his mother and grandmother was so broken and there was never a sense of purpose to their interactions. There is plenty of family and drug-related drama to keep this film moving but the constant dogpiling of plot points further confused me. No real reason for Bev's drug addiction was ever explored, no real reason for the maternal abuse was ever explored, and no real reason for Vance's academic success was ever explored. Taylor never writes plot points that make sense together and it feels like she just took bullet points from Vance's novel and loosely structured them into what she thought would be a passable story. The main issue with films like these is not even that they don't have anything new to say but that they refuse to take a stance on anything. Howard and Taylor had a lot of opportunities to critique Vance's upbringing and how it made him into who he is today but they instead go the safe route of saying absolutely nothing.
Ron Howard is really just showing his weaknesses at this point and while there are plenty of excellent films throughout his body of work to be proud of, movies like Hillbilly Elegy are starting to take over what he is known for. His direction throughout this film is incredibly misinformed and more scattershot than it should have ever been. There never seems to be an order to the movie and for something as easy as a three-act structure, it never even felt like that was attempted. Every dramatic and supposedly climactic scene would escalate to a ridiculous, unexplained level and then de-escalate like nothing had happened. This happens an ungodly amount of times throughout the already too-long film and there was nothing for this drama to build towards. The editing from James Wilcox contributes to this aimless form of storytelling because the flashback scenes contrasted with the current day scenes never had any real reason to be connected. Editing is supposed to take scenes and drive a story forward but I never felt that with this movie. And like I said before, Howard never tries to take a stance on this often riveting story of Vance. He could have used his novel as an opportunity to criticize Vance's upbringing and how it created him into the public speaker and venture capitalist that he is today but instead opts to go the emotional route but fails immensely. Howard is almost known at this point for his "nice-guy" sense of filmmaking and this general tone was not the right choice for the direction of the story. He never chooses what he wants to do with the film and never lets his audience know what he thinks of Vance and dancing on this middle ground does nothing for either the audience's appreciation for the subject matter or for Howard's talents as a filmmaker. The performances from Adams and Close were pretty abysmal and it honestly hurts me just to type that. They are both some of the most talented and respected actresses in the game for many reasons and it is such a shame to see them go all-out for an offensive and meaningless script such as this one. Both of their performances just felt so plastic and over-the-top and perhaps that's because the rest of the film didn't match up to their talents but it made them appear even worse. Basso and Bennett were *fine* in their roles but something about the energy Adams and Close exuded just never sat right with me. Along with the casual, unwarranted racism and unnecessary amount of screaming, Hillbilly Elegy is just a magnificent failure at anything that has made Howard's previous work at least adequate to the average audience member.
The last thing I would ever want to say about an Amy Adams and Ron Howard collaboration would be that it's superficial but oh god was this superficial. Hillbilly Elegy has no reason to exist outside of its original, novel format, and I feel like if anything, this movie is a warning to any venture capitalists out there who think their story is anything special. Audiences don't want to see your whiny upbringing. Audiences don't want to see your current vanilla life with nothing worthy of complaining about. And above all, audiences do NOT want to see the magnificent talents of Amy Adams and Glenn Close wasted on a script like this.
My Rating: ★½
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