Hillbilly Elegy (2020) trailer #1

I viewed Hillbilly Elegy yesterday on Netflix and found it quite impressive—"good/very good." The acting is outstanding (not just the Golden Globe-nominated Glenn Close, who proves memorable and vivid as a gritty grandmother, but also, in particular, Amy Adams), and the movie is very consistent from the perspectives of tone, mood, and pace. It is engrossing and well-edited, and many of the scenes are dramatically intense—even riveting—without strain. 

There are a couple of notable flaws. The biggest is that the movie's flashback-oriented structure becomes a bit mechanical and overly metronomic; perhaps Hillbilly Elegy needed to be—say—twenty minutes longer in order to create a slightly more organic sense of narrative construction. And although the following flaw proves more modest, without having read the book (which I want to do at some point), the decision to have the Yale law student protagonist, J.D. Vance, drive home to Ohio to deal with his drug-addicted mother's heroin crisis on what turns out to be the day before a crucial legal interview seems like too obvious of a melodramatic device. Yes, it creates some temporal urgency and tension, but it also means that the movie cannot transcend narrative convention. Indeed, one wonders why Vance did not just purchase a plane ticket and fly back from nearby Cincinnati to Yale—he is poor, but as the movie shows, he does have credit cards. 

That said, director Ron Howard must be credited for a nicely judged sensibility here. Howard strikes me as an erratic commercial director, equally capable of both fine films (2008's riveting Frost/Nixon) and forgettable mediocrities (2015's bloated In the Heart of the Sea). Hillbilly Elegy, though, strikes me as something close to his best. The movie probably is not as raw and naturalistic as it could be—Hillbilly Elegy is not John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) or Clint Eastwood's Honkytonk Man (1982)—but it also is not nearly as sentimental as one might have imagined. Shrewdly, Howard treats the characters and material with respect rather than either false glorification or condescension. He does not prop these people up as the embodiments of "real America," but he also honors their dignity, humanity, and basic awareness. Although one wishes that the narrative structure would have given Hillbilly Elegy a little more room to breathe, the movie does look and feel real, meaning that it manages to avoid compromising its source material. 

To that point, Hillbilly Elegy uses pop songs sparingly as part of its soundtrack. And the songs that it does use work. Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Tuesday's Gone," while effective enough, is predictable in retrospect, but Bananarama's "Cruel Summer"—perhaps the best hit pop song of my lifetime, with its mesmerizing evocation of wistfulness and pain—shows up in an unexpected, dynamic, and subtly telling manner.