Published in 2016 as Donald Trump was ascending to the presidency, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy achieved bestseller status as an introduction to the poor, lowly educated class of Americans he enamored. The personal memoir about growing up in Appalachia with a drug-addicted mother and a violent grandmother offered critical insight into a world foreign to most Americans and the mainstream media.
The motion picture adaptation of the memoir, released in the waning days of the Trump presidency, is directed by Ron Howard with Amy Adams as the mother and Glenn Close as the grandmother. Despite the top-notch Hollywood talent, "it doesn't work at all," according to Peter Suderman of Reason.
The operating theory behind the adaptation seems to have been: What if we took all of the aspects of the book that made people interested—the cultural insights and self-criticism, the ethnographic examination of dysfunctional Appalachian life and its unspoken codes—and completely stripped it away?
The book was a phenomenon because it was an object of sociopolitical fascination. It was treated as a field guide to what was essentially a foreign culture (at least to a lot of urban, college-educated professionals) hidden in the American hinterlands. The movie, in contrast, is a context-free, episodic story of one guy's adolescent struggles with a difficult family. In the end, he goes to college. That's it.
