The American Dream bleeds through the screen of “Hillbilly Elegy,” the Netflix movie adaptation of JD Vance’s acclaimed novel of the same name. From the very first scene of the movie, the bright colors, overly metallic sound of the radio, and over-the-top patriotism overstimulate the viewer.
“Hillbilly Elegy” tells the story of JD Vance, a man hailing from small-town Ohio who, against all odds, is attending Yale Law School. Suddenly, he is called home when his mother is hospitalized after an overdose and he is forced to reconnect with his roots.
The movie is much like JD Vance himself – too charismatic, implausibly down-to-earth, and difficult to completely unpack. When Vance was selected earlier this year as Donald Trump’s running mate for the 2024 election, his authorship of “Hillbilly Elegy” was seen as an incredible asset. Now, having seen the film, I understand why.
Vance’s story takes his own broken, mundane childhood, and dips it in sickly sweet sugar. It glitters falsely in just the right way to convince viewers that his pain is the same as theirs. Yet, despite the movie’s attempt to sum up the entirety of a nation’s suffering and heal it, it ends up seeming like an insecure man exaggerating his own suffering.
Garishly blunt scenes stud the movie, shocking the viewer into stunned sympathy. Vance’s childhood, as portrayed in “Hillbilly Elegy,” is brutal and traumatic.
One notably horrifying scene is when Vance’s mother accelerates on a small, winding road while threatening to crash the car. Vance appears to be eight or nine years old at the time, making the sharpness of his mother’s words seem twice as cruel.
“I could crash this car and I could kill us, and then you would know how lucky you are,” she said.
Vance’s relationship with his mother is complicated, as she struggles with addiction throughout the movie. She is fired because she gets high, and skates around the hospital she works at, among other ridiculous and extreme incidents. Later, during Vance’s grandfather’s funeral, the camera hesitates for a moment on his mother while she takes a few pills.
The action seems all the more significant because of the melancholic fiddle music that underscores the whole scene. The musical score throughout the film is laudable, as the composer, Hans Zimmer, expertly weaves together soulful sadness with traditional American sounds and instrumentation. Zimmer’s success is unsurprising given his experience writing music for movies like “Interstellar,” “Gladiator,” “The Lion King” and “Dune.”
But not even a good soundtrack can hide the blindingly stereotyped facets of “Hillbilly Elegy.” The implausible mistakes that Vance makes in Yale, mistakes that are meant to reflect the permanence of his Ohio roots, detract from Vance’s credibility.
For example, Vance reacts with confusion and panic to being offered more than one type of white wine and is stressed to the point of calling his girlfriend to ask for advice about which silverware to use at a formal dinner. Whether or not his character would plausibly know either of those facts, he certainly wouldn’t have reacted with such panic to a new cultural realization, especially after years already spent adapting to the new culture of university.
When he returns to Ohio to care for his mother, Vance comments that baloney “might be outlawed” at Yale, a line which is supposedly a witty remark, but in fact comes across as a vague stereotype. A better actor might have been able to make the line more compelling, but the lead actor, Gabriel Basso, makes the comment sound flat and cliché through his superficial, cardboard acting.
“Hillbilly Elegy” tries to disguise the rhetoric of a broken, charming man in a cloak of mediocre acting and sensationalized trauma. The result is an oversaturated film that is mundane enough to trick most into believing its false truth.
The first voice in the movie is a man’s voice preaching that “the American Dream, the singular hope of our people, remains ever out of reach,” but that should be the last; a reminder that no matter the sweet poignance of his movie, Vance’s American Dream is nothing more than a hollow promise.
