Year Released: 2020
Directed by: Ron Howard
Starring: Amy Adams, Glenn Close, Gabriel Basso, Owen Asztalos
(R, 157 min.)
Genre: Drama

“Where we come from is who we are, but we choose every day who we become.” – JD Vance

Who am I? That question reverberates throughout great literature, including Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, Huckleberry Finn, and The Catcher in the Rye. And it just what JD Vance is asking in Hillbilly Elegy.

Is he the little boy who felt most at home in the hill country of Jackson, Kentucky?

“Down those hollers is where I spent every summer. Hands down the best part of my childhood. It’s where my people come from.”

But even there he and his family are outsiders. They have left those Kentucky hills for Middletown, Ohio, and on their visits the local boys let JD (Owen Asztalos) know they hold him in a kind of contempt for abandoning his roots. The idyllic swimming hole soon becomes a drowning pool as they work as a team to hold JD under water. Outnumbered, he still tries to redeem himself, because Middletown, Ohio, or not, JD and his folk live by the code:

Things could get tough down in Jackson in a heartbeat, but Mamaw and Papaw taught me that you never start a fight. But if someone starts one with you, you better make damn sure you end it. If you can’t end it, your people will always have your back. And that was our code, and to me, our code was everything.

JD is caught between two worlds, the one of freedom and family and the one in Middletown with its steel mill, neat framed houses, and a way of life that feels wrong.

Whatever better life my grandparents had been chasing up Route 23, they never caught it. We were all different in Middletown somehow. I don’t know, like something was missing. Maybe hope.

And that lost hope has a long and sordid history, too, one that seeps out like rancid air from a closed up cellar. Maybe “seep” is not the right word, because that history hits JD like a slap across the face in the frequent casual cruelties that pass for conversation in the Vance family.

Young JD: Mamaw, why can’t we stay longer? We’re always the first ones to leave. I don’t get why you ever left Jackson in the first place.
Bev: Because when you’re knocked up at thirteen, you get the hell out of Dodge. That’s why.

So his grandmother, Mamaw (Glenn Close) at 13 pregnant by 16-year-old Papaw (Bo Hopkins), is the reason they had to leave town. (The book discloses a few more squalid details that JD finds out much later.)

Confusing JD even more is the love/hate relationships he has with the two women in his life.

Let’s start with Mamaw, and an unrecognizable Glenn Close erasing any sexy images we might remember from her 1987 femme fatale / bunny boiling role in Fatal Attraction.

She is tough love personified, even if some critics complain that Ron Howard sweetened her up too much for what they complain is a somewhat sanitized presentation in the film. Certainly she has a foul mouth, praising the lord as a sort of communion sacrament and then following it up with a chaser of the vilest language and imagery possible. She has a perennial cigarette in her mouth, attested to by the overflowing ashtrays in her otherwise orderly house, and prefers her favorite films to any news of the world – a commendable choice in Different Drummer’s view. One film she never tires of is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator :

Mamaw: Everyone in this world is one of three kinds. A good Terminator, a bad Terminator, and neutral.
Young JD: You’re a good Terminator.
Mamaw: Well, I wasn’t always. I had to learn. Now, you could be too, if you don’t f*** it up. You’re like me.

Only later does JD flesh out the details of “I wasn’t always,” when his older sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett) tells a tale that flashes on the screen like the Christmas lights on the tree at the time. It involves a violently drunk Papaw, two sisters herded into the closet, and a blaze that certainly was not a Yule log.

When JD gets into trouble as a wayward teen and his drug addled mother seems to ignore it, Mamaw comes to the rescue, telling her daughter Bev (Amy Adams) that she is taking JD to live with her, and that if she has any problems with that, “You can talk to the barrel of my gun.”

That she has left the hospital, ripping the IV from her arms to rescue JD, adds to Mamaw’s heroism here. She continues to be she blunt and hard as nails when JD lives with her.

Mamaw: Now stop stealing things, do your f***ing homework, and find some decent friends.
Young JD: I don’t want new friends.
Mamaw: Well, then you’re not going to have any.
Young JD: You can’t tell me who I’m going to hangout with. You’re not my mom.
Mamaw: I’m all you got.

On the other hand, Amy Adams as Bev is as weak as Mamaw is strong, as vacillating as Mamaw is stalwart. Also unrecognizable from her Disney princess role in Enchanted, Adams shines as an actress even if the character she displays is generally a woman tottering between drugged oblivion and inner rage, with only a few flashes of goodness and warmth. But JD (Gabriel Basso as the older JD) turns his head from the memory of his mother screaming on the street or driving her car at breakneck speed and threatening to kill them both in a crash and remembers the faint glimpse of what she could have been.

Interviewing for an internship during law school at Yale –yes, he did take Mamaw’s advice and towed the straight and narrow – he lashes back at a law firm partner referring to his people as rednecks, and in presenting himself as he really is, someone of two clashing worlds, he earns the respect of the one who counts, the senior partner, Phillip Roseman:

JD Vance: [after feeling insulted during his dinner interview] My mother was salutatorian of her high school. The smartest person I’ve met. Probably smarter than anyone in this room.
Rich: Maybe so. Well, I didn’t mean any disrespect.
Phillip Roseman: Well, it looks like you failed on that one. Well, it sounds like we should be offering your mother a position.

***

The structure of the film is as erratic as the people it describes, skipping through rapid and almost random flashbacks like Albert Einstein giving a drunken lecture on the space-time continuum. While it is a bit jarring and confusing to the audience at times, it probably mirrors the jumbled thoughts and memories that wrestle each other in JD’s mind as he tries to deal with who he is and in which world he belongs.

And yes, Director Ron Howard eliminated the historical ruminations Vance the author included in his memoir. Nor does he touch on his political philosophy. And perhaps as a director he did not detail some of the more rancid behavior JD witnessed in his “hillbilly” life. But Ron Howard is creating a film, telling a story, and a pretty darn compelling one at that. JD’s life is the narrative. Those wanting political red meat to salivate over will have to read the book.

Perhaps the ending is a bit too upbeat. Speaking as an English major who cut her college teeth on deconstruction and its embedded nihilism, I applaud Ron Howard for this decision. In youth nihilism is enticing; in maturity it sucks the life from us just as in reality that life begins to ebb.

Here is how the film ends. JD has triumphed and emerged from his troubled youth and family, and if you watch the credits, so have they. It is a time for reflection and celebration, is it not?

Twice I’ve needed to be rescued. The first time it was Mamaw who saved me. The second, 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 is 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.

–Kathy Borich
🥁🥁🥁🥁

Trailer

Film–Loving Foodie

Although (J.D.’s) Mamaw and Papaw moved from the Appalachian Hills of Kentucky to Middletown, Ohio, they never quite fit in there.

As J.D. Vance wrote himself in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy…

I’d like to tell you how my grandparents thrived in their new environment, how they raised a successful family, and how they retired comfortably middle-class. But that is a partial truth. The full truth is that my grandparents struggled in their new life, and they continued to do so for decades.

One of Papaw’s good friends—a hillbilly from Kentucky whom he met in Ohio—became the mail carrier in their neighborhood. Not long after he moved, the mail carrier got embroiled in a battle with the Middletown government over the flock of chickens that he kept in his yard. He treated them just as Mamaw had treated her chickens back in the holler: Every morning he collected all the eggs, and when his chicken population grew too large, he’d take a few of the old ones, wring their necks, and carve them up for meat right in his backyard. You can just imagine a well-bred housewife watching out the window in horror as her Kentucky-born neighbor slaughtered squawking chickens just a few feet away.

Let’s do something with those squawking chickens, ok? How about a Hillbilly Chicken Casserole, complete with mushrooms, onions, peppers, celery and wonderful noodles in a cheesy sauce. And you can cook it up in crockpot for the whole family, even if you don’t have a handy flock of chickens in your yard.

Or if you want an actual item from the film you can make up a fried bologna sandwich. Certainly easier, but probably an acquired taste.

Hillbilly Chicken Casserole

Ingredients

8 ounces noodles
3 cups chicken, cooked, diced
1/2 cup celery, diced
1/2 cup green bell peppers, diced
1/2 cup onions, diced
4 ounces mushrooms, canned, drained
1/2 cup chicken broth
1/2 cup parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons butter, melted
1 cup sharp cheddar cheese, grated
1/2 teaspoon basil
1 1/2 cups cottage cheese, small curd
1 can cream of chicken soup

Directions

Cook noodles according to package directions but slightly undercook them . Then drain and rinse the noodles with cool water.

Get out a large bowl and mix the remaining ingredients in it. Gently fold in the cooked noodles making sure they are completely coated with the chicken and broth mixture.

Pour everything into a greased crockpot and cook on low for 6 to 8 hours, or on high for 3 to 4 hours.

I like to serve this with some sliced tomatoes or a side salad.

Hillbilly Housewife.com