Hillbilly Elegy (2020)

Hillbilly Elegy arrives with the posture of an awards-season contender: Ron Howard directing, Hans Zimmer on the score, Amy Adams and Glenn Close performing at full volume. What it delivers is a domestic melodrama about a family in Middletown, Ohio, and the Appalachian roots that follow them north. The camera stays close on the shouting. Addiction, relapse, a grandmother who discharges herself from a hospital bed to retrieve a grandson from bad company, a young man who joins the Marines and then talks his way into Yale Law. The material is raw and the performances are large. The film wants us to feel something, and it works hard for every tear it extracts.

The film's politics, such as they are, remain the politics of the memoir it adapts: personal responsibility, family loyalty, the Marines as a ladder, the GI Bill as a second one. Economic hardship is present in every frame, but it is framed as a condition to escape through individual effort, not as a system to indict. Race is absent from the conversation, and so is any suggestion that the people on screen might be anything other than what they appear to be. There is a matriarch at the center and two formidable actresses playing her and her daughter, but the film has no argument to make about women, about class as structure, or about the country that produced these circumstances. It observes, and it does not lecture.

Critics were unkind, calling it poverty tourism and worse, while audiences responded more warmly and the Academy handed Glenn Close a nomination that sat alongside her Razzie nod for the same performance, a distinction achieved by only two other performers. The film's afterlife has been stranger still, its viewership spiking whenever its subject enters the news cycle. As a piece of cinema it is competent and soggy. As a document of modern social consciousness it is a void. There is nothing here to argue with, and nothing here to agree with either. Just a family, a hill, and a great deal of shouting.