'Hillbilly Elegy' Draws Savage Reviews
by EG
Ron Howard's Hillbilly Elegy tries to paint a portrait of poor rural white people in the Trump era, but critics aren't having it. Part of the problem is that the movie attempts to remove all the politics from an intensely political subject. And, apparently, that doesn't work very well. Read on for details.
Despite its all-star pedigree, Ron Howard's Hillbilly Elegy, starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close, has been criticized online since it debuted on Netflix last week.
The movie, which had a limited theatrical release before hitting the streaming service, has a 27 percent freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with The Chicago Sun-Times' Richard Roeper one of the few top critics who gave it a good review, writing in part that it is "a beautifully constructed, unforgiving, heart-tugging family epic."
Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson, meanwhile, writes that the film is “distractingly Hollywoodified, a rich person’s idea of what it is like to be a poor person, a tone-deaf attempt to assuage a very particular kind of liberal guilt."
And The Washington Post's Michael O'Sullivan criticizes it for taking an apolitical approach.
"[The film] eschews theories — more prominent in the book — that might help explain the opioid epidemic and the seemingly unbreakable cycle of poverty that defies simplistic solutions (yet might cause people to seek deliverance from a political outsider)," he writes. "The problem is that in doing so, the movie leaves us, like [the main character's] family, with only a mounting pile of baloney excuses for bad behavior."
And Rolling Stone's David Fear writes, "The politically conservative, anti-welfare streak in the author's writing feels surgically removed; only the turbulence remains, smothered in the syrup…of seasonal treacle. No one would accuse this adaptation of owning the libs or pandering to a base. It's merely poverty-class cosplay, a pantomime of what people derisively call "white trash" triumph and tragedy being sold as prestige drama. It's an attempt to serve Spam on a sterling silver platter."
Although J.D. Vance's memoir on which the film was based became popular in the wake of Trump's 2016 election win as Vance made the media rounds explaining the candidate's appeal to poor white voters, and the movie was conceived at a time when Hollywood was trying to better understand the country that elected Trump, the film removes the political elements as Howard sought to focus on the family drama.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.
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