BEFORE: Gonna try and squeeze this one in on a Sunday late morning/early afternoon, before pulling an evening/night shift at the movie theater. Since "Black Widow" opened, I'm working more hours this week (four nights, in addition to the three day shifts at my main job) so I may not have much time this week to watch movies - I'll be lucky if I can get my four films in. I think I started cutting back at JUST the right time - plenty of time left in the year 2021 to get my full 300 films in, since I'm almost at 200 for the year right now!
My sleeping schedule, on the other hand, is a complete mess. Working until 1 or 2 am, getting home at 3 am sometimes, then having to go to the office the next morning by 10 (or more typically, 11) - something's got to give, eventually. Even having two days a week to catch up on sleep, like maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays I can still sleep in, it doesn't feel like enough. I'm walking around in a daze, like I'm a week behind on sleep. I've got a plan to get another job and quit the ushering business, but it's by no means a sure thing, and even if that does come through, it wouldn't be until August - so it looks like I'll be six kinds of exhausted for the near future - I like having a little extra cash coming in, but at what cost? I've never been so keenly aware of the exchange rate taking place, giving up hours/days of my time to get that money.
Amy Adams carries over from "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny".
THE PLOT: An urgent phone call pulls a Yale law student back to his Ohio hometown, where he reflects on three generations of family history and his own future.
AFTER: This story is told in half-flashback, the film toggles between the adult J.D. Vance traveling back home from Yale to care for his addict mother, who had the nerve to O.D. during his Interview Week, and flashbacks of his childhood years, during which he faced abuse and neglect due to his mother's mental instability, until essentially being adopted by his grandmother and getting himself onto a better personal path.
Ron Howard directed this, based on a best-selling novel, but the timing of the film's release was notable - November 2020, on streaming, during a pandemic year when such a release would still qualify it for the Academy Awards. Do you smell that? It's "Oscar bait" of the highest order - only it didn't work. Sure, this film got two Oscar nominations, one for Glenn Close and another for Make-up & Hairstyling, but it sure feels like somebody was expecting a few more. Maybe for Amy Adams, maybe for Ron Howard, maybe for Adapted Screenplay, whatever, it feels like they were swinging for the fences and only made it to the infield warning track. Why? What, if anything, went wrong, or was the film simply not worthy?
One possible theory is that the film explored "white person problems" at a time when such a thing has fallen out of favor - just look at which films did get more nominations: "Judas and the Black Messiah", "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom", "Minari", "One Night in Miami" and "Soul" are some films that got more nominations than "Hillbilly Elegy" got - see what I mean? "Nomadland" was also about white people struggling (umm, I think), but it also had a female director of Asian heritage who won. "Hillbilly Elegy" is told from the POV of a white male college student at Yale Law School, and really, come on, who cares about his struggle?
I'm being facetious here, of course - it's great that J.D. Vance got out of rural Ohio/Kentucky and got to Yale, more power to him, but still, STFU about it. It's impossible to tell this story of someone who escaped a lower middle-class situation by volunteering for military service in Iraq, then I guess qualifying for YALE via the G.I. bill without also somehow coming across as a celebration of his own entitlement. "Oooh, poor me, I've got interviews with high-profile firms at Yale this week, and I don't know if I can make the interviews!" God, what a douchebag. I don't know the man personally, but his character just won't shut up about his scheduling problems, which most other people would be lucky to have. Dude, you've got two choices, go visit your mother in the hospital or keep your interviews, you simply CAN'T DO BOTH. And whichever one you do, stop second guessing yourself or wondering if you're doing the right thing, just pick a god-damned road and stay on it!
Much is made of the 10-hour distance between Middletown, Ohio and Yale, which is in New Haven, CT. Vance drives back to Ohio when he gets the news about his mother, without any reasonable plan for returning in time for his interviews. OK, so then, mother it is, forget the interview - because apparently once you're double-booked, there's simply NO WAY to reschedule an interview, or explain that there were extenuating circumstances involved. Instead it's just better to bitch and moan about the vagaries of fate or the stupidity it takes to double-book YOURSELF and then not do anything to correct the problem. And then what's weird is that Vance has like a dozen credit cards to pay for his mother's stint in rehab, but never considers the possibility that he could also buy a PLANE TICKET and get back to Connecticut more quickly. Nope, 10-hour drive it is. Look, I've made that run from Ohio to New York several times, in a previous life - it's not easy, Pennsylvania seems to drag on forever, and I wouldn't have made it without my first wife as a driving partner and a bunch of Jolt Cola. But come on, there's an easier way to DO things, figure it the eff out!
Before we find out if this previously underprivileged white person gets to continue his upward mobility into a life of being more privileged than before, there's a ton of flashback material to Vance's childhood. Excessive time-jumping for sure makes things very confusing, but I think it's just a split timeline, the scenes in the past are told (more or less) in order, detailing his mother's many failed relationships, her getting fired from her nursing job for using drugs while on shift, and basically she's somebody who never took responsibility for any of her own actions. I realize that the forces of addiction are strong ones, but people who skate by and never develop a hard-working attitude tend to have children who do the same, and thus the cycle is perpetuated.
It's great that J.D. had a strong grandmother figure who was there to put him on another path - since my parents both worked I also spent a lot of time with my grandmother, but that can potentially be both good and bad - I learned my ethics from a Depression-era German immigrant who told me to "stay away from girls" until I finished college (umm, I missed that goal by about two months) and one time, I caught her saying that Hitler had some good ideas for running Germany, he just took things a bit too far. Thanks, Gram, that's good to know.
The book this was based on was actually intended to be a hard look at suburban and rural America, like welfare recipients spending money on cell phones, and Vance's resentment of people who seemed to profit from their own poor behavior while he struggled as a grocery store cashier. People with no work ethic complaining about their job's long hours and then post on social media blaming everything on the "Obama economy" - very little of that is in this movie, which chose instead to focus on his mother's attempts to marry out of poverty, and constantly backsliding during her attempts to stay clean and sober. When you find yourself asking your own son to pee in a cup for your drug test, this could be a chance for some self-reflection and a realization of a need to make better choices, perhaps. NITPICK POINT: Wouldn't the drug testers be able to determine that Mrs. Vance's urine specimen came from a male?
Look, I get it - I've got two parents who are turning 80 this year, and my mother's showing signs of dementia. I can visit for a couple days here and there and try to do some tasks around the house, get the printer working again, entertain them with some movies and order take-out meals for them, but those are stop-gap measures at best. My father is now in charge of my mother's prescriptions and doctor's appointments, and he's never cared for another human, a pet, or even a houseplant before. So if he goes down, I've got to drop everything and catch a train for Massachusetts right away. But still, I've got to lead my own life, I've got jobs and responsibilities in New York, so ultimately there needs to be some decision made about their long-term care at some point. J.D. found himself in a similar quandary, pulled in two directions by his education and career on the East Coast, and his family in Ohio (or was it Kentucky? Honestly, that was never quite clear.). But for God's sake, hurry up and figure it out, because watching somebody on the fence on this issue, navel-gazing through his whole upbringing, searching for an answer, was quite agonizing. Perhaps that was the point?
NITPICK POINT #2: If you pay for your mother's rehab, on twelve different credit cards, and then she doesn't stay there, do they refund you right away, or do you still have to pay for her treatment? They never really answered this. Little inconsistencies like this make me then wonder how much of this story was really true, in the style of "A Million Little Pieces".
Be aware that Glenn Close somehow received both an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress AND a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for Worst Supporting Actress for her role as "Mamaw" in this film - how is that even possible?
Also starring Glenn Close (last seen in "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her"), Gabriel Basso (last seen in "Super 8"), Haley Bennett (last seen in "The Devil All the Time"), Freida Pinto (last heard in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Bo Hopkins (last seen in '"The Newton Boys"), Owen Asztalos, Jesse C. Boyd (last seen in "The Highwaymen"), Stephen Kunken (last seen in "Otherhood"), Keong Sim, Morgan Gao, Ethan Suess, Jono Mitchell, Bill Kelly (last seen in "The Last Thing He Wanted") David Dwyer (last seen in "Selma'), Sarah Hudson, Ted Huckabee (last seen in "Are You Here"), Helen Abell (ditto), Max Barrow, Sunny Mabrey (last seen in "The New Guy"), Brett Lorenzini, Tierney Smith, Kinsley Isla Dillon (last seen in "The Mule"), Ryan Homchick, Joshua Stenvick, Bill Winkler, Chase Anderson, Amy Parrish, Ed Amatrudo, David de Vries (last seen in "Richard Jewell"), Abigail Rose Cornell (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), David Jensen (last seen in "Loving"), Rohan Myers, with archive footage of Al Gore, Arnold Schwarzenegger (last seen in "The Last Stand")
RATING: 4 out of 10 Joe Montana trading cards
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