Hillbilly Elegy
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
We are playing catch up by reviewing films that are a part of the current awards season.
Okay… so…
Hillbilly Elegy is a perfect film… for being a textbook example of why films shouldn’t always try to capture things literally “as they are”. Maybe the Vance family here is as dysfunctional as they are shown. The moral given at the end of this true story is that family might not define who we are, but we define ourselves as extensions of what we learn with our families. So, to a degree, we're meant to sympathize with the Vances. Well, I find it so difficult in the way Ron Howard shot Hillbilly Elegy to do that. Even if this is what life for J. D. Vance felt like, that doesn’t translate well on film. I have nothing wrong with challenge. I love challenging films. Sátántangó is seven and a half hours long and purely miserable, but it knows how to create passive misery, dynamic misery, and empathetic misery; it’s not just a single note the entire time.
Watching Hillbilly Elegy was like trying to down one of those monster sized, grease-soaked novelty burgers you get at expeditions and fairs. It feels more like a chore than an experience, I was inundated the entire time, and I felt quite lousy afterwards. The biggest issue is how Howard saw fit to make the entire film play like the climactic moment of another better film. Not every single portion of an intense drama has to feel like this. Even the very beginning has hectic editing and overwhelming music and imagery, set to a neutral voice over about the togetherness of the Vance family, and how they stick up for one another during fights. I get it. There is bullying and fighting going on, but does Howard know you can shoot scenes like this without always resorting to synthetic ardor?
Hillbilly Elegy is just too much, man. Too much, too much.
Between the “epic” direction and the heavy handed screenplay by Vanessa Taylor, all I could think of is how Hillbilly Elegy actually had so much going for it, only to be stifled by two forces that tried to make an already-immense story even more effective. You have a fantastic supporting role by Glenn Close, only for moments to be spoiled (like an empathetic moment with a dramatic pan-and-zoom, making Close look goofy rather than impactful). Amy Adams is usually on the mark here, but here are moments where she overacts (I’ve never felt this way about Amy Adams before, either), and I feel like another director may have corrected this. The story by J. D. Vance is actually incredibly interesting, given his struggles to distance himself from his family, even though their self destruction keeps rotating in its vicious cycle. There is so much here. I can only imagine if someone like David O. Russell wrote and directed this, maybe he would have captured a more real depiction of the novel, whilst having organically connecting moments to balance the film out.
Instead, Hillbilly Elegy as we currently know it is cinematic suffocation. There is zero room to breathe. Each scene tries to outdo the previous one, until you reach the top of a wobbly Jenga tower of Oscar-baiting moments meant to astound you; that’s when you realize there’s still an hour left. There are great moments that only feel smothered by the rest of the feature. I couldn’t find myself appreciating these scenes outside of separating them from the picture (but then they have zero context or build up, so they don’t truly work this way, either). As much as I don’t want to be this guy, Hillbilly Elegy feels like it was made specifically to be an awards season darling. It’s as if someone downloaded Adobe Photoshop, realized the plastic wrap filter looks really cool (news flash: it doesn’t), and had to apply it to one hundred pictures, before showcasing this slideshow to their family.
It’s so enormously false to the point of irritability, and yet this was clearly something Ron Howard believed in. Rather, let me ask this: did he believe the film was great, or that it would win a lot of awards? The answer reality has served us and Howard is the same for both: no. What could have actually been both a great film and an awards season juggernaut is actually painful to watch, and I know it absolutely didn’t have to be this way. Yet, here we are. If you like feeling like you’re in the middle of a fight while the most insane final 5 seconds of a sporting event plays over the course of two hours sounds good, be my guest and watch Hillbilly Elegy. You’re bound to feel exhausted and unfulfilled, and you might need to cure that migraine and that permanent scowl you’ll be sporting.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.