Golden Globes 2021: Hillbilly Elegy

A common joke in my friend group is that I am the bicoastal elite. I grew up in Los Angeles and now live in New York, and aside from my college experience in Pittsburgh, a city that straddles the cultures of the East Coast and the Midwest, I have not spent a significant amount time outside of the two biggest cities in the United States.

I am open about my knowledge gaps when it comes to US culture and geography and have no illusions about my lived experiences being universal. I’ve spent a bit of time in the Midwest (I have spent at least a little bit of time in the four biggest cities in Ohio) but I’ve never really been to the South (I’ve been told Orlando doesn’t count). I’ve only been to fifteen out of fifty states, and of that list most of them I visited only briefly and/or only for the most touristy reasons (i.e. I’ve unfortunately been to Las Vegas). A region of the country I have basically zero experience with is Appalachia.

All I knew about Hillbilly Elegy before going into my watch was that one of my friends from college, who is from West Virginia, absolutely hates the book that is it’s source material. The film (and presumably the book) focuses on the true story of JD Vance (Gabriel Basso), a Yale law student torn between his academic and professional life and his family in Ohio and Kentucky as his mother Bev (Amy Adams) experiences drug addiction. The film shifts back and forth between JD trying to help get his mom into a rehab facility and flashbacks to his teenage years.

For the most part, this film is just very sad. It is a portrait of white poverty in America, and shows a community in pain that has been left behind by it’s government. The part of the film I found the most harrowing is when Bev, grieving for her father, starts to get high at her job as a nurse. When she gets found out, she loses her job and thus her insurance, making it impossible for her to get into rehab in the present-day plot of the film. It clearly demonstrates how poverty and addiction are cyclical and how difficult it can be to get off the hamster wheel once you’re on it, especially in a country where there are almost no social supports and poverty and addiction are viewed as character flaws rather than systemic failures.

However, the film also demonstrates the power of family in combatting these systemic injustices. JD is able to succeed only because he is taken in by his Mamaw, played masterfully by Glenn Close, who ensures he gets good grades and stays out of trouble. One of the presiding criticisms of this film is that it’s perpetuating stereotypes around the community it seeks to portray and that it further emboldens the myth of bootstrap-capitalism- that if you just work hard enough and pull yourself up by the bootstraps, you too, can have the American, white, heterosexual, capitalist dream. While I understand those concerns, I think they’re misdirected. I have not read the memoir that the film is based on, nor have I done research into which elements of the film were dramatized or fictionalized, but I think it’s unfair to throw criticism at a story that is based in truth. JD did pull himself up by his bootstraps, supported by his grandmother, and has gone onto build a better life for his children. His mother was a heroin addict (thankfully, as we find out in the credits, she has been sober for six years). These are the facts of his life and his story.

What we need to examine is why these stereotypes are perpetuated in media and why we tell the stories we tell. Are we romanticizing poverty? In this case, I don’t think so, but there’s definitely an argument to be made that the prevailing narratives surround poverty in the mainstream media are usually problematic, patronizing, or somehow engaging with toxic capitalist ideals. It is valid that people from this region or from a similar socioeconomic bracket don’t feel accurately represented, but in my view the solution is that we tell more stories that take place outside of big cities and less stories about wealthy people, not vilifying this particular story.

The only Globe nomination received by Hillbilly Elegy is for Glenn Close’s performance, and I do agree that it is one of the best of her recent career. I had the immense privilege of seeing her in the play Mother of the Maid, in which she played Joan of Arc’s mother, and I have no hesitation to call her one of the greatest actresses of her generation, truly on a tier with Meryl Streep and Viola Davis. She transformed fully to play Mamaw, and during the credits when they showed home video footage of the real Vance family, it was uncanny how similar they appeared. The hair and makeup department did an excellent job. I also think Amy Adams deserved a nom, and she was honored with one by the Screen Actors Guild, as watching her fall apart while trying to remain a functioning and supportive mother was often harrowing and deeply emotional. Also, Owen Asztalos, who played teenage JD in the flashbacks, did a really great job.

However, while watching this film and applauding these performances, I couldn’t help but be reminded of one of Sarah Ruhl’s essays from her book 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, which is one of my all-time favorite theatrical reference texts, it comes up in many if not all of my dramaturgical work. In her essay “Greek masks and star casting,” she writes:

“When a star is cast in a play, what does the audience see, other than the play? The audience also sees the actor’s persona, underneath the language, or above the language, which is, in a way, like watching a masked actor. We are watching, super-imposed, the three-dimensional mask of all the old photographs of the actor we have seen before in a Playbill or People magazine.

[. . .]

In effect, one might argue that the relationship between nobodies and somebodies has now been reversed in the theater. It used to be in Shakespeare’s times that nobodies, actors, would play royalty, somebodies. Now there is no royalty in our culture but for actor-celebrities themselves. So now the actors are somebodies in real life while on stage they pretend to be nobodies. And we no longer write about royalty on stage; we write about the common man.”

While I by no means want to assert that the poor are nobodies, in our society and culture they are treated as such. And celebrity worship is alive in while. While neither Glenn Close or Amy Adams are tabloid darlings, they both are multi-award winning actresses working at the top of their field and well-known by the general public. Even when they do their job to the absolute best of their ability as they disappear into their roles, the audience never fully loses their grasp on the fact that it is a performance. Maybe this is why they call it poverty porn, not because the poverty itself is being romanticized, but because we’re awarding some of the wealthiest and most respected people in our society for visually reducing themselves to the level of those most down-on-their-luck or, more accurately, most abandoned by those promised to help them.

I don’t really have anything more profound to say. Watch the film, if you’re interested, or don’t. I do definitely recommend Sarah Ruhl’s book though. It has many other gems.