Hillbilly Elegy (Imagine Entertainment, Netflix, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Sunday, July 28, my husband Charles, his mother Edi and I watched the 2020 film Hillbilly Elegy, based on the 2016 memoir by J. D. Vance that got seized on by much of the liberal intelligentsia as the best explanation they were going to get as to why Donald Trump had won the Presidential election and what all those people in what seemingly sophisticated East and West Coast intellectual enclaves dismissed as “flyover country” really thought, felt and voted. Vance had already had a quite remarkable rise from poor son of a drug-addicted mother – he was born in Kentucky but raised in Ohio when his family moved there to take a job at a steel mill – to law student at Yale. Since then he’s had an even more meteoric career; he briefly worked in Silicon Valley as a venture capitalist, got elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio largely with the money of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and in June 2024 was appointed by former (and quite likely future) President Donald Trump as his running mate. It’s impossible to watch Hillbilly Elegy without thinking of the as-yet unwritten sequel, especially since the whole premise of the movie is whether J. D. Vance (played as a boy by Owen Asztalos and as a young man by Gabriel Basso) will make it to his all-important internship interview on time despite his mother Bev (Amy Adams in a quite remarkable and completely de-glamorized performance) having just overdosed on heroin and needing his help back in Middletown, Ohio. The script of Hillbilly Elegy is by Vanessa Taylor, and Ron Howard provides his typically quiet, understated direction to tell a story that is oddly moving despite Vance’s creepy politics.

It’s basically the story of how Vance as a boy was torn between his drug-addicted mother – she trained as a nurse and actually put herself through nursing school while raising him as a single parent after his father died, then started helping herself to the abundantly available meds and ultimately got hooked big-time – and his maternal grandmother, who goes by the bizarrely infantilizing nickname “Mamaw,” pronounced “ma’am-awe” (Glenn Close). Mamaw takes over the raising of young J. D. after his mother, high on something or other, takes him out for a drive and deliberately speeds the car. In panic, he tells her to stop, and when she finally does, she slaps him a good one, then pleads with him not to report her to the police. Before that Bev, J. D.’s mother, was so free with her affections that he literally has no idea who his biological father was. She cycles through men at near-warp speed, and one day she announces to J. D. that she has just got married – not to the man J. D. had known she was dating but to Ken (Keong Sim), who heads the dialysis unit at the hospital where Bev works. As we see J. D. abruptly moved out of the home he’d felt more or less comfortable in and forced to move in with Ken and share a bedroom with Ken’s pothead son, I said, “Now we know why J. D. Vance hates step-parents so much!” J. D. Vance was caught on video a few years ago saying that the Democratic Party was run by “childless cat ladies.” When this surfaced recently, he tried to walk it back by saying he hadn’t intended to insult … cats. Elsewhere he’s said that people who don’t have children should have fewer votes in elections than people who do because only by having children do you establish a stake in the future – odd talk coming from a man who joined the rest of the Senate Republican caucus in killing Joe Biden’s child tax credit and who’s running on a ticket with a Presidential candidate who’s pledged to “drill, baby, drill” on day one and end all Biden’s attempts to promote the sale of electric cars. One of Kamala Harris’s step-children – she and her husband, Doug Emhoff, haven’t had kids of their own but he brought two children he’d had with a previous wife – responded on X nèe Twitter defending their family and saying that “we love our three parents.”

Hillbilly Elegy is a sometimes confusing movie; at times the only way we can tell when a particular scene takes place is by whether Owen Asztalos or Gabriel Basso is playing J. D. Vance in it. Howard tries his best but he can’t always smooth out the often abrupt transitions in Vanessa Taylor’s script. Nonetheless, the suspense buildup at the end – will Vance make it to his all-important interview with the super-rich white dude who can make or break his career? – is effectively done, and Vance’s (East) Indian girlfriend (now his wife) Usha (Freida Pinto) is depicted not as just a convenience but a dramatically compelling character in her own right. At one point Vance and his sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett) find Bev a motel room for the night after she’s forcibly discharged from the hospital following her overdose, only she sneaks out and scores some heroin and the “works” needed to inject it. J. D. catches her just in time, just after he’s maxed out his credit cards to raise the $3,000 needed to get her into a rehab program, only, like Amy Winehouse, she’s refused. (So much of this movie is about the ultra-high cost of health care under America’s for-profit medical system you might expect J. D. Vance as a politician to be in favor of expanding opportunities for lower-income people to get health coverage. Instead he’s a good little Republican boy in favor of eliminating the Affordable Care Act and cutting back Social Security and Medicare to fund unnecessary tax breaks for the super-rich.)

Hillbilly Elegy is actually a genuinely moving and even gripping film, thanks largely to Howard’s typically understated direction and the finely honed performances of Amy Adams and Glenn Close. We’re told in the end credits that Bev has got clean and stayed off drugs and alcohol for six years – and the real-life Bev made an almost spectral appearance at the 2024 Republican National Convention, looking like death warmed over as she watched her son become the Republican candidate for vice-president. One wonders how she managed to clean up long-term when we’ve seen her go through so many cycles of recovery and relapse; I suspect that would make an even more interesting movie than the one we have, but telling that story would also mean having to tell J. D. Vance’s political degeneration from Trump critic (he once said Trump “could become America’s Hitler”) to Trump toady and his passing the “loyalty” test – not to the U.S. government or its Constitution but to the person of Donald Trump – Trump demands of his appointees to anything.