Tag: Critics

Yikes. Many people thought Ron Howard’s upcoming movie ‘Hillbilly Elegy‘ might be an Oscar frontrunner. After all, it stars Amy Adams and Glenn Close.

But unfortunately, a great cast can’t save a poor story, at least according to nearly every single critic who has reviewed the movie.

The first reviews came pouring in today, and they were pretty awful. For those who don’t know, this film is based on a memoir of the same name by J.D. Vance.

Hillbilly Elegy is bout the Appalachian values of his Kentucky family and their relation to the social problems of his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, where his mother’s parents moved when they were young. He writes about a family history of poverty and low-paying, physical jobs that have since disappeared or worsened in their guarantees.

So that’s the meat of the story. What could go wrong? Well, a lot. The movie currently sits at a 21% on Rotten Tomatoes.

IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wrote this in his C- review…

For all of the favors that Howard does to the subject of his biopic, the director can only do so much to disguise the self-serving nature of a story that was always less about where Vance came from than it was about where he wanted to go.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw writes…

I’m not sure I entirely believed in Adams either, however earnest her performance undoubtedly is. Bev’s sudden and irresponsible druggie impulse to go rollerskating through the corridors of the hospital that employs her – though very possibly taken from a real anecdote – looks odd and unmotivated on screen.

This is a well-meant story of someone pulling himself up by his bootstraps, with some help from his grandma. But it feels contrived and self-conscious.

Many critics talked about how the film feels like a rich person’s view of poor people. Like the people working on the film didn’t really understand what or who they were portraying.

Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson said the film is “shameless Oscar bait”

I can’t really find much good to say about Close’s performance, except that when the film shows pictures of the real Mamaw during the closing credits, you realize that they did do a pretty good job of turning Close into a lookalike. Otherwise, Close’s work in the film is almost an obscenity, a patrician actor doing the hoariest of brassy-old-lady drag. It’s a kind of mugging that has no place in an age when audiences have become much better attuned to Hollywood falseness than they once were. Every note of Close’s performance is a glaring actor choice, all grim calculation masked as empathy.

Ouch. Hillbilly Elegy hits theaters tomorrow and will be released on Netflix on Nov. 24.