My World Of Flops: Hillbilly Elegy

My World Of Flops is Nathan Rabin’s survey of books, television shows, musical releases, or other forms of entertainment that were financial flops, critical failures, or lack a substantial cult following.

J.D. Vance’s bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy was posited as an important, even essential book that liberals should read because of the insight that it provides into the plight of the white rural poor. The book afforded liberals yet another opportunity to beat ourselves up for being so fixated on identity politics and race that we show insufficient reverence towards the mighty white proletariat. With Hillbilly Elegy, Vance set out to make a contemporary The Grapes of Wrath. He came closer to the little-loved sitcom Mama’s Family.

Vance didn’t fool everyone. The New Republic called him “liberal media’s favorite white trash–splainer” and a “false prophet of blue America.” But Vance did trick Ron Howard into thinking that he had something important and profound to say about growing up poor and white in rural America. 

Howard professed to be “surprised” by Vance’s de-evolution into a MAGA Trump supporter. In 2022, Howard told Variety, “When I was getting to know J.D., we didn’t talk politics because I wasn’t interested in that about his life. I was interested in his childhood and navigating the particulars of his family and his culture, so that’s what we focused on in our conversation. To me, he struck me as a very moderate center-right kind of guy.” Howard said that in their few discussions about politics, Donald Trump’s new running mate struck him as an anti-Trump figure. 

I have difficulty believing that someone as savvy as Howard could believe Vance. Vance is no fool. Vance knew that if he had told Howard that his ambition knew no bounds and that he would do anything for power and influence, including nakedly embracing a controversial figure he had previously compared to Hitler, Howard would have made a very different Netflix movie. Even better, Howard might not have made Hillbilly Elegy at all. 

But instead, the Night Shift director deluded himself into thinking he made an apolitical movie about an apolitical figure. Howard seems bizarrely oblivious to the political overtones of his feverish melodrama about how embracing conventional values of self-discipline, education, strength, and personal responsibility allowed Vance to overcome the messiness of his irresponsible, dependent, drug-addled, morally inferior family. Howard accidentally made a two-hour campaign ad for J.D. Vance as a political candidate and public figure that might as well have played at the 2024 Republican National Convention before he spoke. 

Hillbilly Elegy is pure hagiography, an oblivious love letter to a secret and not-so-secret deplorable. It’s an origin story about how a poor white boy who is more self-disciplined and, consequently, morally better than everyone around him (particularly his mother), grew up to have a seat at the table with the wealthiest, most destructive assholes in the world. 

Ron Howard spent $45 million of Netflix’s money to make a superhero origin story for a man who turned out to be a supervillain. Even that’s too kind. Vance isn’t a supervillain; he’s the lunkheaded henchman who yells, “And stay down!” after the bully has knocked a geek to the ground. Vance is not Lex Luthor: he’s Jimbo to Donald Trump’s Nelson Muntz. 

Hillbilly Elegy alternates between an overachieving Yalie Vance meeting with masters of the universe types in the hope of scoring a plum gig, and a past dominated by the messy personal lives of his grandmother Mamaw (Albert Nobbs’ Glenn Close), a foul-mouthed hellraiser forever on the side of good, and mother Bev (Amy Adams), a troubled nurse whose career and life have suffered due to drug abuse.

Will someone who desperately wants to be a rich white asshole convince older, established white assholes who are already rich that he’s one of them and consequently deserves a seat at the table? Perversely, those are the stakes of Hillbilly Elegy. Howard films the scenes of Vance trying to impress potential bosses with a sitcom-like cartoonishness. The snobs might as well all be polishing their monocles when confronted with the impossibly exotic prospect of working alongside someone who did not grow up exceptionally rich. At its most cartoonish, Hillbilly Elegy has a Thurston Howell III type snootily inquire if the protagonist finds himself thinking, “Who are all these rednecks?” when he goes back home to Appalachia.

With the veins popping in his neck, J.D. (Gabriel Basso) says he doesn’t like the term and that his mother was a salutatorian in high school and more intelligent than anyone in the room.

It’s telling that Vance does not say that poor people have innate dignity, and that it’s classist and wrong to behave as if they do not. Instead, he says that his mother possesses two traditional qualities that he holds in high esteem: intelligence and academic success. Therefore she has value to Vance. 

These dreadful scenes establish that Howard is inexplicably just as tone-deaf, lost, and unconvincing in chronicling the world of the ultra-wealthy as he is in the rural poor.  

The role of Mamaw is so outsized and awards-friendly that Close probably set aside space on her mantelpiece for her Oscar before filming even began. The Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination was inevitable. You cannot pander relentlessly to the whims of the Academy this hard and not walk away with at least a nomination. 

Close delivers an impossibly broad performance as Redneck Madea. She’s got a mouth full of sass and a heart of pure gold. Close dominates the film to the point where the young J.D. Vance becomes a dull background character in his own damn story. 

Whenever a new character is introduced, they instantly become more interesting than the film’s bland potato sack of a “hero.” It doesn’t matter if they’re extras or have no dialogue; just by not being J.D. Vance, they are inherently more likable and compelling than the ostensible hero but actual villain. 

Like many children who grow up poor and are forced to parent themselves, Vance clings to order as a lifesaver in the savage waters of his adolescence. Vance becomes disciplined and hungry for social mobility to transcend his humble origins and ascend to lofty heights. Vance becomes powered by a dreary sense of personal responsibility, which is the key to his success but also renders him hopelessly bland. Close and Adams deliver volcanic performances that are always erupting. The actors playing Vance at various ages can’t compete, but they could at least try.

Howard may be the very image of white middlebrow respectability, but Hillbilly Elegy has a Tyler Perry quality due to Close’s extended homage to Perry’s most famous creation and a tone that alternates between zany comedy, wild action, grim melodrama, and hokey sentimentality. 

The scene where young J.D. steals a calculator from a pharmacy and must bring it back after a stern reprimand from Mamaw feels like a politician’s anecdote. Like an anecdote from a politician, it rings utterly false. That’s true of the film as a whole. This isn’t a bold truth the world needs to see and hear; it’s a cynical fiction designed to make Donald Trump’s pick for Vice President look as electable as possible. 

Hillbilly Elegy closes with a characteristic explosion of syrupy, self-centered sentimentality. We end with Vance, the living personification of the American Dream and embodiment of everything good about us as a people sharing more precocious wisdom: “Twice I’ve needed to be rescued. The first time it was Mamaw who saved me. The second time it was what she taught me: that where we come from is who we are, but we choose every day who we become. My family’s not perfect, but they made me who I am and gave me chances that they never had. My future, whatever it is, is our shared legacy.” It would not feel out of place for the words “Trump/Vance 2024” to appear on-screen against the backdrop of a bald eagle holding an American flag while soaring past Mount Rushmore. 

Those words ring bitterly ironic now that we know what J.D. Vance’s future held. Poor Mamaw and Papaw. Their legacy, regrettably, involves making sure that the J.D. Vances of tomorrow do not receive the same opportunities he did. He pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Everyone else can go fuck themselves. Vance chose to become a hatemonger’s sleazy, sycophantic, couch-fucking, childless woman-deriding sidekick. That is his legacy.

That legacy involves making the already hard lives of the working poor even harder. 

Howard may be playing the long game. Perhaps he’s playing a game of fifth dimensional chess where the whole point of Hillbilly Elegy was to fool Donald Trump into picking a particularly weak and, well, “weird” candidate as his VP choice, knowing damn well that Vance could help Trump lose. 

Howard’s infinitely regrettable idolization of a terrible human being paved the way for Vance to become a national political figure and potential Vice President. It doesn’t matter that Hillbilly Elegy was a notorious, critically-derided flop. What matters is that one of our most popular filmmakers made a movie about J.D. Vance’s inspirational greatness that cost people with Netflix zero dollars to see, and doesn’t require them to put on pants or leave their homes. That put Vance on the national radar in a big way. It endeared the dead-eyed creep to millions of viewers/voters. Howard has a lot to atone for. Hopefully, that will not include unintentionally helping catapult a creep into a world of infinite power. 

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco