It's difficult to know where to begin with
Hillbilly Elegy. In one sense, we have to consider the context of the individuals this story is about and in another we must accept this specific facet to be the truth of their lives. How does one reconcile that author J.D. Vance's memoir on which this film is based is both undoubtedly a vivid recollection of his own childhood as well as a romanticized portrait of a place in America where the pride of having been left behind has a lot to do with the refusal to move forward? The conflicted feelings about how and what the film is representing naturally extend to the DNA of the film itself as, in the opening moments, Gabriel Basso's Vance tells us how much he loved visiting rural Kentucky when he was a boy despite being raised in the rust belt of Ohio; it was the memories he made while visiting the Blue Grass State that he was most fond of. The film quickly contradicts these kind words with a scene where a thirteen year-old Vance (Owen Asztalos) encounters a band of local bullies before being rescued by his local relatives in Kentucky. Vance is obviously sentimental about these moments and has therefore made them more appealing in his memory, but how far does the gaze of these rose-tinted glasses reach? Depending on the author's age at the time of the events being described, what circumstances are being missed and what details are being diminished? How much is Vance actually misremembering? There are a lot of questions left unanswered that director Ron Howard doesn't feel the need to address as he largely focuses on the core family dynamic at the heart of Vance's story, but what's riveting about the execution of
Hillbilly Elegy is that it feels the need to explain as much as it does chronicle the reasons these people have ended up the way they have. There is this notion that because they really are well-meaning people underneath their poor life choices that they deserve some type of exception when it comes to discussing said shortcomings. Aside from the complicated cultural discussion around the "hillbilly condition" though, and how sorry viewers should be made to feel for these individuals who can't get out of their own way, Howard and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor (
The Shape of Water) smartly focus on the prevalent themes around how much community and family genuinely mattered to Vance while growing up in these undeniably unforgiving environments and the complexities of the problems he faced and deals with well into his adult life due to this jagged support system.
