Post by Dracula on Dec 12, 2020 18:53:49 GMT -5
Hillbilly Elegy(12/10/2020)
Hillbilly Elegy is the big budget prestige adaptation of a book of the same title that has a very strange and rather loaded place in modern American culture. The book, a memoir about the Ohio/Kentucky upbringing of a dude who ended up going to Yale Law School and more or less “escaped” the environment he grew up in. That book became a bestseller right after the election of Donald Trump, largely because the literary class was freaked out about that and were looking for books that would offer some sort of explanation for what would dive a certain class of people to vote that way. In the ensuing four years there’s been something of a backlash to the book and to the instinct that made it popular (people got real sick of seeing articles obsessively interviewing people in red state diners) and this makes the release of the book’s film adaptation on November 11th 2020 rather awkward given that people are more ready than ever to see the media trends of the Trump era drown in a toilet. And even without all that baggage, the idea of Ron Howard dressing up Amy Adams and Glen Close as hicks in order to use studio filmmaking to figure out what makes the rednecks tick raises all sorts of red flags of good taste. The reviews for this thing have been acidic in their disdain and I must say that I started the movie anticipating a hatewatching experience but the movie I got was less aggressively terrible than it was just complete exercise in pointlessness.
My understanding is that, for better or worse, the book using the author’s Appalachian experiences to make various points about welfare and resentment. Those were probably points worth arguing about but they were at least points being made. In the movie those points are not really made either explicitly or implicitly and you’re basically left with a series of stories about a rather unremarkable dude being raised by an abusive drug addict. It kind of reminded me of the movie 8 Mile in terms of depicting a similarly impoverished and difficult upbringing but the subtext of that movie is that what we’re watching are the formative experiences that made led to the development of a generation defining rapper. Here we’re just seeing the upbringing of J. D. Vance, and J.D. Vance is not Eminem, he’s an anonymous lawyer who worked for a venture capital firm but the movie treats this like it’s the origin story for some kind of amazing celebrity. What’s more Ron Howard seems uniquely unsuited to this material. It’s certainly not impossible to make this kind of anthropological look at poverty work, Sean Baker and Chloé Zhao are both doing excellent work in that regard, but Howard is a guy who’s been rich and famous since a very young age and certainly doesn’t have the time to embed himself in this world like those two do. The resulting movie just feels exceedingly phony and slick. The whole project just reeks of being a project that Hollywood snatched up the rights to because it was on the best seller list despite not actually having any particular idea what they were going to do with it and then rushing a rather uninspired adaptation into production while it still had some relevance and even there they seem to have failed.
*1/2 out of Five
Hillbilly Elegy is the big budget prestige adaptation of a book of the same title that has a very strange and rather loaded place in modern American culture. The book, a memoir about the Ohio/Kentucky upbringing of a dude who ended up going to Yale Law School and more or less “escaped” the environment he grew up in. That book became a bestseller right after the election of Donald Trump, largely because the literary class was freaked out about that and were looking for books that would offer some sort of explanation for what would dive a certain class of people to vote that way. In the ensuing four years there’s been something of a backlash to the book and to the instinct that made it popular (people got real sick of seeing articles obsessively interviewing people in red state diners) and this makes the release of the book’s film adaptation on November 11th 2020 rather awkward given that people are more ready than ever to see the media trends of the Trump era drown in a toilet. And even without all that baggage, the idea of Ron Howard dressing up Amy Adams and Glen Close as hicks in order to use studio filmmaking to figure out what makes the rednecks tick raises all sorts of red flags of good taste. The reviews for this thing have been acidic in their disdain and I must say that I started the movie anticipating a hatewatching experience but the movie I got was less aggressively terrible than it was just complete exercise in pointlessness.
My understanding is that, for better or worse, the book using the author’s Appalachian experiences to make various points about welfare and resentment. Those were probably points worth arguing about but they were at least points being made. In the movie those points are not really made either explicitly or implicitly and you’re basically left with a series of stories about a rather unremarkable dude being raised by an abusive drug addict. It kind of reminded me of the movie 8 Mile in terms of depicting a similarly impoverished and difficult upbringing but the subtext of that movie is that what we’re watching are the formative experiences that made led to the development of a generation defining rapper. Here we’re just seeing the upbringing of J. D. Vance, and J.D. Vance is not Eminem, he’s an anonymous lawyer who worked for a venture capital firm but the movie treats this like it’s the origin story for some kind of amazing celebrity. What’s more Ron Howard seems uniquely unsuited to this material. It’s certainly not impossible to make this kind of anthropological look at poverty work, Sean Baker and Chloé Zhao are both doing excellent work in that regard, but Howard is a guy who’s been rich and famous since a very young age and certainly doesn’t have the time to embed himself in this world like those two do. The resulting movie just feels exceedingly phony and slick. The whole project just reeks of being a project that Hollywood snatched up the rights to because it was on the best seller list despite not actually having any particular idea what they were going to do with it and then rushing a rather uninspired adaptation into production while it still had some relevance and even there they seem to have failed.
*1/2 out of Five
