Hillbilly Elegy movie review: An eloquent requiem to tough love and perseverance

Hillbilly Elegy movie review

Film: Hillbilly Elegy
Cast: Amy Adams, Glenn Close, Gabriel Basso, Owen Asztalos, Freida Pinto
Director: Ron Howard
Rating: 3/5
Runtime: 116 min

Donald Trump's current Republican VP running mate J. D. Vance who was once Trump's highly vocal opponent and reviled for his ‘Childless Cat Ladies' remarks on social media, is better known in India for his marriage to Indian American Usha Chilukuri. Named James Donald Bowman at birth, he changed his last name to Vance, his maternal grandparents' name, shortly before his marriage in 2014. This film under review though is not about his marriage or his name change. It's about his life and achievements before that.

A character-based memoir based on Vance's book ‘Hillbilly Elegy,' the narrative chronicles Vance's life as a teenager and a graduate student. In the film Gabriel Basso plays Vance as an adult and Owen Asztalos plays him as a kid. As is common in book-to-screen adaptations some of the characters in the book have been dropped and some others have been merged. Howard and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor also choose to keep out sections that dealt with Vance's political leanings and his criticisms about Hillbilly culture. So what we get is not exactly an altogether faithful adaptation -it's more of a decluttered one.

The opening scenes introduce us to Vance living life away from his Appalachian roots at Yale Law School. His girlfriend Usha (Freida Pinto) is very much an integral part of his current life and plays an emphatic role in helping him achieve his dream of acquiring a prestigious internship while family issues plague him incessantly. His much married and divorced mother Beverly/Bev (Amy Adams), a career nurse, has an on-off drug addiction problem that keeps resurfacing whenever Vance manages to rise out of the doldrums. His sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett) is the one bearing the full brunt of that dysfunction but when emergency calls, Vance is compelled to rush into a 10-hour drive from New Haven to Middletown, Ohio to discover that his mother has no health insurance and nowhere to stay once the hospital releases her - he has to deal with all this a day before his precious interview for the internship slot.

The non-linear narrative goes back and forth in time between 1997 and 2011, sometimes incoherently interspersing scenes from a decade earlier - reminisces about being brought up in Ohio, and interactions with his extended family who have ‘hillbilly values' and hail from Kentucky. His mother was always unstable and had a history of drug addiction. His grandmother, Mamaw (Glenn Close), finally took on the onus of becoming his guardian, using tough love to teach him life lessons. These flashbacks and flash-forwards ensure the understanding of his highly conflicted and complicated life. His perseverance through all the many struggles he encountered in his young life is what distinguishes him from the many other contenders for a premier position in American Politics.

Howard engages the viewer through a widescreen lens that captures the white-trash vibe competently. It's a sympathetic portrayal that zeroes in on class markers and makes us aware of the pitfalls and hurdles in the precipitous climb out of first world poverty.

Ron Howard's depiction of Vance's memoir may not be a masterpiece but it does well to present an honest picture of a dysfunctional family dealing with addiction, recovery, domestic abuse, financial deprivation, and myriad other problems arising out of belonging to a deprived section among whites. Howard's helming basically allows the story and characters to take center-stage. And its affecting in its attempt to portray Vance's conflicted relationship with family members who have the power to affect the course of his career path.

The casting choices are bang on. It's easy to believe that JD as a young child portrayed by Asztalos will grow up to become the version portrayed by Basso. The performances are also first rate here. Glen Close as Vance's Mamaw, Adams as his troubled Mom Beverly, Hayley Bennet as his sister Lindsay and Freida Pinto as his love interest Usha, all leave an impact strong enough to be memorable. This film about Vance's lived-in experience is definitely worth a watch.