J.D. Vance isn’t a movie critic, but he’s a quick study on how that industry thinks.
Vance wrote the celebrated “Hillbilly Elegy” in 2016, a memoir detailing how his Appalachian roots both shaped and hindered his quest for the American Dream.
Now, he’s promoting the Netflix film adaptation of the book, directed by Oscar winner Ron Howard and starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close. The movie appeared ripe for Oscar glory, at least on paper, until the vast majority of critics trashed it. And then some.
“Problematic.” “Inauthentic.” “Depressing.” “Unwatchable.”
One scribe begged Netflix subscribers not watch the movie … at all.
Seem harsh? Howard himself said as much recently, suggesting critics viewed the movie through a political, not critical lens.
Does Adams or Close don a MAGA hat in the movie? That’s not the issue. Vance is a Christian author who leans to the right, even if he’s not a Trump booster. His 2016 book critiqued social welfare programs, putting him in some cultural critics’ cross hairs.
For all those reasons, Vance says he “expected” the political fallout from the critical class.
“A lot of people don’t like me personally, my politics and things I’ve said publicly,” Vance tells The Daily Wire. “That reverberated onto the movie a little bit, even though the movie is a different animal … it cuts out a lot of the socio-political commentary.”
Howard, Vance says, didn’t expect what he clearly saw coming from the chattering class.
Some liberal scribes greeted Vance’s memoir with a dollop of understanding upon its release, hoping to learn more about a part of the country too often ignored or dismissed. Back then, many media outlets framed “Hillbilly Elegy” as an explainer, of sorts, for Donald Trump’s shocking rise and victory.
The climate is far different after four years of President Trump, Vance says.
“After the 2016 election, everyone was interested in working class white stories. That’s shifted. They’re not as interested in investigating that part of the country [as much now].”
The timing for the book proved prescient. The same proved the opposite for the film version, he adds.
“That bothers me,” Vance says, but not for egotistical reasons. Appalachia still suffers from the opioid epidemic and economic woes that plagued the region back in 2016. The culture’s empathy for the region, though, has diminished since then.
Vance, who enlisted in the Marine Corps and later served in Iraq, wasn’t sure he even wanted Hollywood to transform his story into a feature film. The industry came calling, though, eager to leverage the memoir’s success.
“I didn’t want to talk to them,” he says. He softened when Howard approached him.
“I just really liked him,” he says of the Oscar-winning director despite their political differences. Howard recently assembled the old “Happy Days” cast to raise money for Wisconsin Democrats. “He was really taken by the people in the book.”
The two spent some time together, and Vance read early drafts of the “Hillbilly Elegy” script that increased his comfort level.
“You have to accept the process … you don’t have full creative control and go with it,” says Vance, who still shared an executive producer credit on the film. “You’re always worried something will go wrong.”
“Hillbilly Elegy” proved a literary sensation four years ago, but the film version’s release proved how different the two media can be. Vance has been flooded with often “intense” messages from people in recent days who watched the movie and rushed to reach out to him.
“The book is so personal they feel they can open up to you, how tough some people have had it,” he says.
Vance says there’s another reason the book and the movie caused such a kerfuffle. Pop culture doesn’t address the issues he explored often enough.
How many films and TV shows are set in Los Angeles, he asks with a laugh. The issue expands far beyond the working white class featured in his memoir, epitomized by Close’s larger-than-life take on Vance’s “Mamaw.”
“The entertainment industry would do well by doing what Ron [Howard] did, take interesting stories from the middle of the country and tell more about them,” he says.
It’s why the outsized critical backlash deserves greater scrutiny. The “Audience Score” for “Hillbilly Elegy” is an impressive 82 percent “fresh” at RottenTomatoes.com, the most notable critic aggregator site.
The RT critics, in stark comparison, gave it a 25 percent “rotten” rating.
That “disconnect” is real, Vance says, adding critics might want to “look in the mirror” to reassess if they’re reflecting the communities they claim to represent.
“I don’t think they will,” he notes.
Vance says Howard’s artistic instincts, in both seeking out Vance’s story and stripping away the memoir’s political DNA, speak to a larger issue. Appalachia may not get many Hollywood closeups, but the region has a sizable impact on the culture at large.
People assume Appalachia is a “radically different place” than the rest of the country. It’s also larger than many think, spanning 205,000 square miles across 13 states.
He notes that West Virginia transformed from a solid blue state to a rock-ribbed Republican region in recent years, the only state that’s “fully within the Appalachia region,” he notes.
Consider the crush of country music artists, poets and writers who all either come from that part of the country or were deeply influenced by it.
“The cultural influence of the region extends far beyond specific mountains,” he says.