Seeing Hillbillies

By SETH SANDRONSKY

The film “Hillbilly Elegy” is streaming on Netflix, a film that some critics slammed. “A sluggish drama,” according to the Buzz Magazine critic, “that struggles to convey anything we haven’t seen before, done better and less clumsily.” I, however, enjoyed watching the film version of J.D. Vance’s 2016 bestseller memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture.”

Why? Viewing human complexity helps me to understand what I have experienced, which is the basis of my consciousness.

Each familial relationship in “Hillbilly Elegy” is complex in its own way, a bit like Tolstoy’s take on the similarities of troubled families. Briefly, the family members in this film reveal life events that resonated with me.

In fact, I can say that the author’s relationships with his mother and grandmother compelled me to review the film. I will leave it to the readers’ imagination why that is so.

In brief, “Hillbilly Elegy” unpacks Vance’s life via flashbacks with his Kentucky-born mother and grandparents as they live and work in Ohio. Like the Kentucky family in Harriet Arnow’s 1954 novel, “The Dollmaker,” who move to Detroit for industrial employment, Vance’s grandfather finds a job as a steelworker in the Buckeye State.

Vance’s narrative personalizes how migration for employment is a feature of modern capitalism. Scores of Caucasians along with African-Americans moved from the south to the north for improved job prospects. Black and white wage earners voted with their feet, a revolutionary process of leaving familiar ways of life behind for new ones.

“Hillbilly Elegy,” in part, occurs in Ohio. It is deindustrializing in the 1980s. Michigan, notably Detroit, where “The Dollmaker” takes place in the 1950s, was the car-making leader of the world. Hillbilly culture connects the memoir to the novel, though Arnow’s mother character is quite unlike Vance’s.

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance leaves Yale Law School, temporarily, for Ohio to help his mother, who has overdosed. She is a single parent, a drug addict and a nurse.

Vance’s mom explodes on him, physically and verbally, from time to time. His clumsiness is one trigger for her outbursts.

Glenn Close plays Vance’s grandmother. She is a stabilizing presence in his young life by deed and word.

The grandmother’s character, as Close portrays her, captures the nuanced qualities of strength and tenderness adults can convey as mentors to wayward youth. For example, when Vance runs with peers prone to mayhem, his grandmother redirects him, sternly, to focus on his studies.

She convinces Vance to pursue this path. Director Ron Howard treats this familial guidance with a deft touch.

Amy Adams plays Vance’s troubled and troubling mother who never had someone to support her, though she put herself through nursing school as a single mother. She in part is out of emotional control with her son because of that support deficit.

A critique of “Hillbilly Elegy” is that the backstory of the mother delivers scant details. More of these details would, I think, have clarified her meltdowns in front of Vance and his grandparents.

In all, “Hillbilly Elegy” is a balanced look at one working-class family’s peaks and valleys as they make their way in the world. I recommend the film.

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2021

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