Hillbilly Elegy

Last night I decided to see Hillbilly Elegy on the big screen ahead of its release on Netflix next week.  I have heard many conflicting views on this movie so I was eager to see what all of the fuss is about for myself.  It is based on the memoir of the same name by J.D. Vance, which I have not read, and I gather that the book is much more political than the movie.  The Vances are a multi-generational family from the Appalachian region of Kentucky.  They are caught in an endless cycle of extreme poverty, drug and alcohol use, and physical abuse.  Mamaw (Glenn Close) and Papaw (Bo Hopkins) make it out and hope for a better life in the steel town of Middletown, Ohio but their relationship becomes abusive as the area becomes economically depressed and they end up perpetuating the cycle of violence.  Their daughter Bev (Amy Adams) also hopes for a better life, becoming the salutatorian of her high school class, but she, too, gives up her ambitions when she becomes a single mother to Lindsay (Haley Bennett) and J.D (Gabriel Basso as an adult and Owen Asztalos as a teenager).  She flits from man to man and job to job, abusing drugs to cope with the reality of her life.  Young J.D. starts hanging out with the wrong crowd and getting into mischief but Mamaw, hoping to break the cycle, takes him in and uses tough love to get him on the right path.  Through hard work and determination he makes it to Yale Law School but, as he is interviewing for a prestigious summer internship, he is called home to deal with his mother's latest heroin overdose.  Will he put his family or his future first?  The narrative is sometimes very haphazard, jumping multiple times between 1997 and 2011 (there are flashbacks within flashbacks without much thematic cohesion), and is quite superficial.  It masquerades as social commentary without delving into the underlying causes of generational poverty or engaging in any meaningful discussion of what it takes to overcome it.  The characters, while they give Adams and Close a chance to give very showy transformative performances that are already garnering a lot of Oscar buzz, are strangely one-dimensional and never really rise above stereotypes.  Honestly, I sometimes found this movie really boring because the characters don't do much more than scream each other after they make the same mistakes over and over again.  Ron Howard gives us the requisite feel-good ending but it seems very abrupt and, therefore, not earned.  I had so many questions about how Bev is suddenly able to rise above the circumstances that have plagued her for decades.  I didn't especially like this movie and I would definitely recommend waiting for it to stream on Netflix if you want to see it for yourself.