‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Surges on Netflix After Trump Names JD Vance His Running Mate
A day after J.D. Vance was announced as Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate, “Hillbilly Elegy” shot to No. 6 on Netflix’s top 10 movies.
The film is based on Vance’s 2016 bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” The film starred Academy Award nominees Amy Adams and Glenn Close and follows a former Marine from southern Ohio-turned-Yale Law student who is on the verge of landing his dream job when a family crisis forces him to return to the home he’s tried to forget. His tumultuous, impoverished upbringing centered heavily on a mother (Adams) who as an addict could not keep her demons at bay.
TheWrap’s Alonso Duralde reviewed the film as “less like the exploration of a life or an evocation of a time and place and more like an informercial for J.D. Vance, who is more salt-of-the-earth than those snooty lawyers, but also manages not to fall into the traps of ignorance and poverty and addiction that befall so many of the people with whom he grew up.”
The review added, critically, that it “isn’t interested in the systems that create poverty and addiction and ignorance; it just wants to pretend that one straight white guy’s ability to rise above his surroundings means that there’s no excuse for everyone else not to have done so as well.”
A roundup of reviews at the time were roundly negative, finding the Netflix feature to be “laughably horrendous” and the “worst film” of director Ron Howard’s career.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker behind “A Beautiful Mind” adapted Vance’s memoir from a screenplay by Vanessa Taylor.
Close was nominated at the Oscars that year for her supporting performance as Vance’s grandmother. That nomination was echoed at the Golden Globes and SAG Awards. But it wasn’t all accolades for the her turn: She was also nominated for Worst Supporting Actress at the Razzie Awards. The film received two other Razzie nominations — Worst Director for Howard and Worst Screenplay for Taylor
Adams also got a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Female Actor in a Leading Role.
“This is a Ron Howard production, so the pieces do at least fit together with ease. Legendary cinematographer Maryse Alberti aptly captures the various locations, from the leafy campuses of New Haven to the grim fluorescents of a shabby motel bathroom, while editor James Wilcox allows the audience to pinball backwards and forwards through J.D.’s life without losing the thread,” TheWrap’s review concluded.
Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate for the state of Ohio in 2023.
“Hillbilly Elegy” is available to stream on Netflix.
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