(by Madan Mohan)
There are films lately where the critical consensus is so different from my own impressions that I am left to question whether I am going bonkers. Or whether the critics are. Or if this is just life happening, me getting older and forming perceptions based on my own experiences and worldview rather than depending on somebody else’s framework. One such is Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy.
I actually should have echoed the collective meh issued by critics on this one. I shuddered when I read Howard was going to direct the Hollywood adaptation of JD Vance’s autobiographical non fiction account of life in the Rust Belt/Appalachia. My shudder came from a place of having read the book and thus feeling deeply skeptical about a Howard take on it. Howard is a Hollywood veteran with a neat take on everything, be it schizophrenia and game theory (Beautiful Mind) or Formula One (Rush). A take so neat that you could fill up the background score cues with several albums worth of Kenny G and not miss a beat. Those are both good films, mind you.
But as I watched the film, I realised that the Ron Howard treatment is exactly what works for Hillbilly Elegy.
Yes, as the critics complain, Howard converts a sprawling account of the myriad problems of life in run down Rust Belt and Appalachian towns into the personal underdog story of JD. Perhaps, though, there is little else you can fit into a two hour movie. More to the point, this perspective distils the essence of Hillbilly Elegy such that you’d better understand it.
The sprawl of Hillbilly Elegy (the book) is also its problem. It’s too vast in its scope. It narrates JD and his family’s struggles with extreme dysfunction and blows it up into a larger story of what ails the Midwest. It criticizes politicians and the hillbillies (as well as the current favourite punching bag – the coastal elites) alike in the same breath. At the end of it all, you are left with a book that you find highly informative and also poignant in many places and yet can’t figure out quite what the point of it is. I mean, why is JD a libertarian (who also studied in Yale and works in the media) if inter-generational poverty and a lack of economic opportunities are the reigning issues of the Rust Belt? The book is made interesting by these contradictions but is also dragged down by them.
By cutting out the politics but keeping the culture, Howard gives us a stirring portrait of dysfunction, addiction, despair and, yet, resilience. JD’s mother (played by Amy Adams) just can’t get a break. She gets fired from jobs and in turn fires her boyfriends or husbands or what have you. And the once obedient and chubby child that JD was is starting to morph into a teenage vandal. It is at this point that his grandmother (Glenn Close) or Mamaw as he calls her steps in and takes charge of the situation, cutting out all the B.S from his life and impressing on him that if he has to have a chance at all to make it, to make something of his life, then he must shape up. Cut to the present and JD lands an interview for an internship at a prestigious law firm that will in turn fund his sophomore year at Yale.
Uh, that’s it. The relative modesty of the destination brings to mind 1983’s surprise hit Flashdance (also spurned by the critics, albeit with a lot more justification). Flashdance ends with the protagonist acing an audition that will grant her the opportunity to perform at a Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance. That’s it. Not quite the starry-eyed dreams Hollywood generally conjures up for us. Not like walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers, you know. This may explain the critical meh – all this hand-wringing for an internship, really?
But hey, getting to continue his education is a pretty big deal for JD. Because it’s his ticket out of the mess that his life has been up to this point and the mess that Middletown, Ohio (JD’s hometown) is. As he tells his mother after putting her up in a motel, just as he is about to leave on a long drive to the law firm all the way from Ohio, he is not saving anyone as long as he is stuck in Middletown. He needs to leave in order to “make her happy”. In other words, JD must join the coastal elite who make him feel like a fish out of water at a dinner early in the film, if he is to save his Midwestern family.
The love-hate relationship between these polarized tribes of America summed up without any overt political references. It’s there if you mine the context. If you don’t, it remains a poignant tale of a boy rising up to make something of himself in the face of a difficult upbringing.
It is also (and I wonder that the critics missed this!) the story of how a tough old lady (Mamaw) teaches little JD to be a man in the best sense of the word. By getting his lazy ass off the couch, getting rid of friends who mean nothing but trouble, by topping his class, by working jobs on the side to make ends meet and by helping her in any way he can. With his grandfather passing away when JD is still a kid, it is the women in his life – Mamaw, mother and his big sister – who all step up to help him get a shot at making it in life. Because – and this is the implicit inference – they have, at some level, failed and are resigned to their fate.
Is a tale of three women striving to make a success out of a proud little hillbilly kid the best, the most awesome storyline? Not really. But is it well worth exploring? Surely. Not quite the misfire then that you may have been told it is.
H. Prasanna
December 13, 2020
BR, is the anonymity of the writer intentional or did you miss the credit line? Asking because the article itself doesn’t have anything that might need writer anonymity (not counting the strictly anti-Ron Howard brigade at this blog who are hiding in the alley waiting to dropkick his first defender).
LikeLike
(Original) venkatesh
December 14, 2020
I came at it with the same background as yours :
a) Read the book
b) Ron Howard , oh god no.
Given the material, this is really a Kitchen Sink drama and in the hands of a British director (and actors) this would have been something.
As it is , the movie glosses over a lot of the troublesome racism that is inherent in the novel and more importantly is known to the critics who are majority “the coastal elites”. This is a major failure of the movie .
If you are making a social comment on the Appalachians (The Hill People) you cannot gloss over the bone-headedness (its not so much that the Amy Adams Character cant catch a break but more that she is a fucking druggie and were she black would have been shot dead by now) , the perceived victimhood and the racism that is all too clear to anyone who has lived and/or even visited the region.
Hence the pillorying by the critics and justly so.
LikeLike
brangan
December 14, 2020
I kind of agree with (Original) venkatesh. Ron Howard makes generic movies, but with solid and unflashy competence — and that works for a lot of films. But those films (say, BEAUTIFUL MIND) have solid beats in the writing.
Here, when you are taking up such unique characters and such a unique milieu, the gloss-over treatment in the sketchy screenplay feels shockingly inadequate. Hardly any character feels more than a chalk outline.
Had the same story been set in a generic suburb in the US, it wouldn’t have come across as so… condescending, I guess.
PS: “the troublesome racism that is inherent in the novel ” – have not read the book. What is this “troublesome racism”?
H. Prasanna: Haha. Missed adding Madan’s name. WordPress has changed its (back-end) templates and UI, so it’s taking me a while to figure out how to post stuff. I hope (from the viewer end) nothing’s different.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Madan
December 14, 2020
BR: From my memory of reading the book, it does not have those beats and is all over the place. It is very interesting but only works as a book. At the same time, it is a subject worth filming. So it’s a dilemma. And the other characters being sketchy is also a reflection of the book. The book itself is pretty self-obsessed considering the mission JD lays out, another of its interesting contradictions. Oh, and he also barely touches upon racism in the book.
venkatesh: “she is a fucking druggie and where she black would have been shot dead by now” – Now this line of argument is not one I agree with. Just because it happens to blacks doesn’t mean it should happen to whites too. I would much rather it stopped happening to blacks too.
That said, I would have certainly liked to see a more honest account of racism in the Appalachia but I don’t know if artists can take that risk anymore in America? Yes, risk. Because some critics or should I say activists have become so daft that they latch onto depiction of racism in a film or a work of art to call the maker racist! After the removal of that San Francisco mural, what would be a safe way to depict racism in a movie is a question. So I don’t blame Howard for playing it safe. If we want honest art, then liberals also need to start dealing with the crazy lefties more honestly and stop handling them with kid gloves.
LikeLike
Yajiv
December 14, 2020
@Madan:
Beautiful piece. I have yet to watch the movie (though I read the book some years back) but I am glad it doesn’t reduce these ‘Midwestern poor white folk’ into one-dimensional stereotypes, like all the coastal critics said it does. I have a bit of fondness and empathy for the Rust Belt-afflicted having spent quite a few years there during my US stint. Will have to check this out.
Small comment about JD’s libertarianism (in the book) being at odds with the very free market that crushed Midwestern industries: TBH I have noticed this among many Midwesterners during my years there. They claim to be economically liberal, pro-free market and vehemently against government intervention yet refuse to accept that it is free trade that decimated their livelihoods in the first place.
Also, re: (original) Venkatesh’s comment, does racism need to figure in this story? Bill Burr once said that Midwesterners voted for Trump, despite all the racist nonsense he spouted, because racism just doesn’t clock in their radar the way it does for Coasties. A big reason for that is that there just aren’t that many minorities in the rural Midwest (outside of the big cities like Detroit & Chicago), definitely not in the same concentration as the coasts. Having said that, I would love to see a movie about a family of color trying to make it in the Midwest. I’ve see my fair share of ignorance/racism there, there’s more than enough to weave a story out of it
LikeLiked by 1 person
H. Prasanna
December 14, 2020
Nothing is different from viewer end, BR. Had fun guessing who it was. My money was on Amit Joki. I considered Madan and even the return of Mank.
Good one, Madan. I haven’t watched it, but I see where some of the “hate” comes from after reading this. But, I do hope Ron Howard does comedy like Parenthood meets Arrested Development rather than Spielberg-lite biographies and Lucas-lite sci-fi fantasies. He has done the clueless elite archetype very well since American Graffiti.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Madan
December 14, 2020
Yajiv/H Prasanna: Thanks.
Whether it does reduce them to stereotypes is for each one to decide after watching. I don’t live there but have been around in the Midwest as well as upstate New York (the latter being a significantly more unpleasant experience – but didn’t face racism -, especially second time around in 2018 at the height of Trumpism). I felt, speaking of the movie, that I saw a trio of characters whose story was told from a very personal lens. There was in fact very little discussion of the politics or even the events that have led to the current state of inter generational poverty in some Midwest towns. You get a very quick shot showing how the places changed from Mamaw’s time to now. You have to be attentive and notice the empty storefronts and the abandoned steel plants. But me, I have indicated my preference before for that kind of cinema rather than something that tries to explain each and everything, especially through dialogue, to me. I have watched the 2000 documentary about Lima, Ohio called Lost In Middle America. I don’t need the full details, I just want a portrait. I would not say the portrait was amazing and it could certainly be better but I don’t think this is a 1/2 star affair. RogerEbert.com, whose reviews tend to align more with mine, gave it 2.5/4. Likewise I would give it a 3.5/5.
Speaking of Lima, in some ways, the discourse around this reminds me of the furor over Shikara (admittedly a much superior film to this). There was a lot of anger from Kashmiri Pandits themselves as well as the Right who seemed to draw a perverse satisfaction from seeing the full gory details of the exodus and were disappointed that the movie, while brutal enough, didn’t go all the way there. I think people have to understand that a movie cannot comprehensively document the Hillbilly experience. For this story, the best format would have been a mini-series with 5-6 episodes. Failing that, this was a decent primer. If you want more, read the book. Or, as I said, watch LIMA which is a beautiful but saddening documentary. I was saddened also to learn that their Democrat mayor who toiled hard for the town for nearly three decades to keep it from utter collapse, lost his daughter to cancer a few years back and with his town falling for Trumpism, he retired last year from his job. Seemingly couldn’t care less anymore.
LikeLike
Madan
December 14, 2020
Yajiv: Hollywood letting Howard make a movie based on Hillbilly Elegy, even this movie, is already a big deal. Hollywood is America’s unofficial tourism mascot. They carefully curate what impression of America people get to see but must have figured that with Trump in power, a peek into the other side would be justified and even viable. Let them make a movie about black working class in deep blue places like DC, that would be a start. They have to commute all the way from places like Baltimore to downtown DC to work ‘blue collar’ jobs to make a living. Erstwhile black neighbourhoods like Norma are getting gentrified, as elsewhere, and black people talk about it among themselves but nobody is listening.
LikeLike
(Original) venkatesh
December 15, 2020
BR :”Here, when you are taking up such unique characters and such a unique milieu, the gloss-over treatment in the sketchy screenplay feels shockingly inadequate.”
–> Thats it . thats really it.
Madan : “I would have certainly liked to see a more honest account of racism in the Appalachia ”
–> I wanted to say this and didnt do a good job of it.
Yajiv : “Bill Burr once said that Midwesterners voted for Trump, despite all the racist nonsense he spouted, because racism just doesn’t clock in their radar the way it does for Coasties.”
–> Bill Burr is wrong , they voted for Trump because of the all the racist nonsense. Its not a bug , its a feature.
Disclosure : I was part of a study run by that ran for close to 2 years and one of the key revelations was exactly this. People who support Trump support him for what he says about racism not despite it.
Dont want to derail the convo into politics , what with living between US and UK , i have had enough of it to last me till end of next life.
LikeLike
Madan
December 15, 2020
“it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” – On this, I have no disagreement. Even if I may have doubted that assessment in 2016, 2020 left no doubt. Where was the repudiation of racism? If anything, Trump’s dog whistles, nay dog barks, only generated the highest ever Republican turnout. Ohio, where Vance’s from, has gone perma red now smh.
LikeLike
Yajiv
December 15, 2020
@ (original) Venkatesh:
I think what Bill Burr meant to say (at least the way I took it is that) these guys are not even aware that they’re racist, that what Trump is appealing to is the racist part of their nature and should be abhorred. I had friends/colleagues there who were super nice to me and made me feel at home yet would also say “Yajiv, you will never be American.” I tried calling them out on it and they would insist that it wasn’t racism just that I was “different” (dog whistle). It’s like they weren’t even aware that their thoughts were heinous. This was completely different from my experiences in the South (where people wouldn’t even treat me like a fellow human being to have a conversation in the first place) or the Coasts (where such dog whistles, when they happened, could be called out and addressed as people were very aware of them).
However, I’m very interested to hear about your study. My experiences were anecdotal ofc so they won’t match to any thorough research you did.
LikeLike
Madan
December 15, 2020
Yajiv: But isn’t unconscious racism in fact a very troublesome variety of it? As a parallel, this BJP leader claimed Indians cannot be racist because we have been living alongside Africans for centuries (he meant South Indians!!!!). That is unconscious racism. He associates South with ‘kaale’ so instinctively he doesn’t even know it is wrong. But if he acts out on those beliefs, he is going to cause harm to that group (South Indians in his case, racial minorities in the case of the Midwest).
LikeLike
Yajiv
December 15, 2020
@Madan:
I saw that, from a few years back, too 🙂 Unfortunately it’s not an uncommon sentiment. Even Vir Das (the wokest of all woke English-speaking North Indian comics) recently made an offhanded joke about how he couldn’t see the South Indians in a dark room. Definitely agree in that it’s far more dangerous. Better to recognise your racism and have that difficult conversation (for ex., I had to ask myself why my hands tightened on the steering wheel everytime I drove through a majority-Black/Latin neighbourhood in the US).
Anyway, I really need to watch this movie. Am a big fan of the Flashdance-ish hopeful-ambiguous-“it’s a start” type of endings.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Madan
December 15, 2020
Yajiv: Yikes! Didn’t know Vir Das said that. And that relates well to your own example of feeling tense while driving through majority Black/Latin neighbourhoods. The stereotyping gets through into the system and starts conditioning our behaviour. Nobody, myself included, is immune to this. As you say, we all have to be conscious when we are drifting into the dark side and first be honest with ourselves before we start to defend ourselves against an ‘attack’ from somebody else who can see it and calls it out.
LikeLike
KayKay
December 15, 2020
Another nice piece, Madan, am glad you’re still cranking them out which for me is also an affirmation about your general health, which I trust is getting better by the day.
I haven’t seen the movie but as always, was irritated by the typically condescending take from the (coastal elite) critics.
Keep backing one group against a wall, tarring them all with a “racist” brush and see if they don’t hit back, one of the reasons why many whites have turned against the Democratic Party, supposedly the party of the “working class” as long as you’re the “right working class”.
But more insidious is the negation or invalidation of any experience that is NOT non-White which is the current tack of most critics and most of the output from Wokewood these days. Relocate “dust bowl town” to “inner city ghetto”, change the ethnicity of its cast and then see the general tone of reviews change.
Why is the “white trash, appalachian, trailer park dwelling, shotgun wielding” experience of poverty and economic oppression any less valid than an “inner city, gangland infested, black/latino dominated” one?
“its not so much that the Amy Adams Character cant catch a break but more that she is a fucking druggie and were she black would have been shot dead by now”
The issue with addiction is largely mental and psychological and exacerbated by an unceasing cycle of poverty and systemic abuse. It cuts across racial lines so why is one experience negated and the other sympathized with?
What Wokewood is doing currently with their version of “representation” is what Indian Cinema did in the 80s as a retaliation of the caricaturing of Indians (Caucasian Actor brown-faced with a turban and wonky accent) in Western movies: Trot out Bob Christo and beat the ever living shit out of him.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Srinivas R
December 15, 2020
We have had discussion about the rust belt in USA in a couple of posts on this blog. I recently read a different possibility of where the rust belt states to go from here. It was from some random browsing and I am unable to find the link to that blog now. The generally prevalent idea seems to be there is a vast gap in education levels between the rust belt and the coast and the gap is growing all the time. There is no way to bridge the gap or nobody seems to have one.
The idea i came across was, with increasing wage cost even in low cost locations in Latin america and in outsourcing hot spots like India, there is a possibility that these low cost jobs could come back to the low cost rust belt. Specifically, there are parallels to how Ireland became a favorable IT outsourcing destination for EU countries because of proximity, language and low cost. Rust belt has that potential to shift some of the outsourced jobs from India and Latin America to the mid western states.
I also know that Indian IT services firms are trying to set up low cost centers in Arizona, to try and move some of their existing employees from bay area and New York and also get some local recruitment going. Local recruitment will definitely work for some of the voice support that is being outsourced outside US.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Madan
December 15, 2020
KayKay: Thanks! Yes. I am in home quarantine now. Feeling a lot better. But an interesting tidbit here about this writeup. I submitted this in the FC Readers Write section but it didn’t make the cut or so I presume. So I simply copy pasted the word doc onto my email and sent it to BR. But I DID write something on the very day I got discharged, lol. This one got published.
https://www.filmcompanion.in/readers-articles/the-queens-gambit-netflix-the-dark-side-of-precociousness-anya-taylor-joy/
If I already have the general outline worked out in my head, it doesn’t take me very long to write it. Half an hour, maybe an hour tops.
Anyway, yes, now that you mention it, I too felt it was funny that venkatesh seemed to suggest JD’s mom was lucky not to be shot for being a druggie. Almost felt like reading the conservative argument against poverty. I do understand at the same time where the anger comes from because of how the voting went down this time. Unpacking the voting and what needs to change to get people who voted twice for Obama back into the Dem fold is a long discussion, much of which was had in H Prasanna’s article about the debate. In short, they are ‘voting against their interest’ because neither party really wants to represent their interests and haven’t going back to the NAFTA days.
Srinivas R: The Midwest does have some decently performing urban centres as it is. Chicago city may have gone bankrupt but there is still plenty of business in the city and the larger metro area. Minneapolis-St Paul has been doing well and Columbus too. The challenge will be figuring out what to do with these smaller towns, many of which were indeed organised around one, maybe two factories. Those factories are likely not coming back and neither are those jobs and the people who worked in those factories cannot take up tech jobs now. That’s the story of Middletown which features in this film/book and it’s also the story of Gary. Upstate NY has met the same fate – towns like Buffalo, Rochester, Schenectady are struggling with deindustrialization (and no prosperous tertiary sector replacing those jobs unlike the bigger cities like New York or Chicago).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Aman Basha
December 17, 2020
Now that Biden is officially President Elect and Fuckface Von Clownstick has run out of legal options, I remember why I went so ballistic against Joe (and by extension, Obama) immediately after the election results were clear. I read this rather interesting profile of a wannabe Hari Seldon, Peter Turchin. What really surprised me was that he had used his method to predict Trump in the 80s and large unrest in the States in 2020. His predictions and methodology are really worth a read and looking at his assertion that the following decade would be worse, made me wonder about Joe Biden’s efficiency in handling this crisis.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/
https://www.noemamag.com/welcome-to-the-turbulent-twenties/
The assertion of Turchin, that “elite overproduction is the problem” and the need for growth in real wages and decrease in elite numbers matches nicely with Raghuram Rajan’s assertion, that capitalism has “to be saved by the capitalist”.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47532522
Right now, the picture looks very bleak for America and, by extension the rest of the free world as we know it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yajiv
December 18, 2020
@Aman Basha:
This is super fascinating stuff! Thank you for introducing me to the world of Peter Turchin. I’ll have to read up more on his work. As a long time Asimov fan, it is interesting to see predictive history finally take shape. However, I really hope, for the US’s sake, that his predictions don’t turn out completely true.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Madan
December 18, 2020
I think America is indeed at the edge of the precipice. They have been to the brink and come back before. But divisions have become geographic even intra-state in a way that wasn’t before. A state like Kentucky used to be a bellwether, voting for the winner in every election from 1964 to 2004. Missouri had a near perfect record from 1904 to 2004 (a century!), getting only 1956 wrong. Imagine Missouri actually voted for Adlai Stevenson in an election he lost heavily. Cut to today and even Ohio and Florida have ceased being bellwethers. And when you drill down into the map, you see a sea of red rural counties and blue islands being cities and adjoining suburbs. This kind of near perfect division of the population as per voting choices does not bode well. Single issues like guns or abortion don’t determine the totality of your existence but who’s going to tell the American people that? Even now, people are busy fighting each other on social media based on political alignment – GOP supporters claiming the election was fradulent and Dem supporters saying the GOP’s false claims threaten democracy. Nobody is asking why can’t both parties get together and pass constitutional amendments to reform a process that’s clearly painful and archaic. Add to this the covid bloobath and the loss of credibility internationally over their mishandling of it and America is in a crisis like never before.
And amazingly, I don’t think many Americans fully appreciate this as they are locked in the more immediate debates/fights about the shape of the new administration. From what I have read, there is already a move afoot to create a crypto currency led world economy controlled from Davos and dump the dollar. This is why it isn’t just Bitcoin, even Facebook floated a cryptocurrency. And the same people who say medicare for all is impossible now have brought in legislation to make cryptocurrency ‘safe’ (read, control it by fiat). Bet this one will find bipartisan support all of a sudden.
LikeLike
Aman Basha
December 18, 2020
“crypto currency led world economy”-Whoa, whoa, what?? I think the hype around the “Great Reset” is a tad too fantastic, and if they were contemplating a new crypto currency, public opinion (fueled by the populist left and right in the US) would be significantly negative. They’d be asking for a public uprising with that sort of shtick.
LikeLike
Madan
December 18, 2020
Aman Basha: They wouldn’t do it right away. But the momentum is building as US flounders more and more. Next four years are crucial. With crude plummeting, petrodollar is on weak footing. The last minute deal to get UAE, Saudi and Israel on the same page is part of preserving the hegemony. But China and Russia are going to come out of this with stronger balance sheets.
LikeLike
Aman Basha
December 23, 2020
@Madan: We had enough petrodollar wars, what’s the new one going to unleash onto the world?
Anyhow, more than this very unbelievable rumour, I’d say a video of a well connected Chinese professor boasting about how the Chinese can use Wall Street to pressure the new administration is more troubling:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-hunter-biden-criminal-probe-bolsters
The free world and democracy, as we know it, might already be losing Cold War II
LikeLike