Thread by @salimfurth

After I watched @HillbillyElegy, I was puzzled why movie reviewers hate it so much. (It has a 26% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a level usually reserved for mailed-in sequels). Usually I'm a picky movie-viewer and I tend to agree with the reviewers.
rottentomatoes.com/m/hillbilly_el…

I even re-read the book - which I first read in 2016 (smartly, before I read any of the 3,000 book reviews). So #inthisessay I'll have some comments about the book as well. Here are a few theses:

(1) The book was better than the movie. To some extent, reviewers might have dunned the movie for failing to capture the tone & feel of the book which is...elegiac.

(2) A lot of reviewers complained that Hillbilly Elegy is "Oscar bait", due to timing, style, and the fact the two leading actresses have 13 nominations and not one Oscar. Bad reviews are sort of in-crowd downvotes for the Oscar.

Fair enough, but that's a higher standard than usual.

(3) A big part of the story is the lunacy of the Vance/Blanton family. They scream, they hit, they pull guns in traffic, etc. In the book, @JDVance1 manages to convey that in a dispassionate way - we see it at a remove.

But in the film, there's no filter. In addition, film in general goes over the top. So the screen-Vances seem like a movie cliche while the book-Vances were, especially in 2016, something of a revelation.

(4) That brings me to another big factor: timing. Reading @HillbillyElegy in 2020 won't feel like a revelation. Back in 2015-2016, the opioid epidemic was barely rising into elite consciousness. Reporters were amazed that Chris Christie was connecting with NH voters over drugs.

Now, opioids are passe. Even more so, elites are sick of the "white working class". From 2016-2018, every think tank and magazine sent amateur anthropologists into the interior. But once the 2020 campaign set in, we lost interest. Fascination gave way to disgust.

(5) Film reviewers are mostly liberals, so they don't like @JDVance1. (Weirdly, while some reviews saw this as a shameless Oscar reach for Ron Howard, none mentioned it as prep for a 2028-presidential-run. That's a feeling I couldn't shake watching the movie.)

(6) JD's character in the movie is flat. There isn't any doubt about whether he's going to leave for that interview.

(7) I think reviewers didn't like the movie because it didn't follow the usual Hollywood cliches. That's an odd critique, and everyone will say they prefer surprises and new approaches to stories...but they don't. They hated all the ways it departs from formula.

A number of reviewers said it was set up as a thriller: there's a deadline Macguffin -- can JD resolve the key problem by the deadline? But that's wrong. It's not a thriller, it's a tragedy. And Hollywood doesn't make tragedies.

(How is it a tragedy? There's no doubt in one's mind whether JD will leave in time, and there's no real hope that his mother's life will change. Everyone's playing their part, but the gods have ordained the outcome. Ron Howard might not even realize this was a tragedy.)

(8) One common critique of @JDVance1, since the beginning, is that he isn't a real hillbilly. Some versions of this are really dumb ("Middletown isn't in Appalachia") and ignore the central role of the Great Migration(s) in Middle American demographics.

I recently read both *The Warmth of Other Suns* and *The Promised Land*. They conflict on certain points, but both agree that the (Black) Great Migration is basically unknown, even among the participants. It was a mass event carried on at the family level.

There are intelligent versions of "JD isn't a real hillbilly". One is made by people who live in Appalachia and speak from their own authority. Another - my own - is that, by @JDVance1's own account, a real hillbilly would never air his family's dirty laundry in public. QED.

So the film is fine but not great. Do watch it if you care about JD's story. It's easy to imagine better ways to build a movie around the book - maybe a family epic following Mamaw, Mom, and JD all circa age 14? But that's a missed opportunity.

I look forward to voting for @JDVance1 for president in 2028.

ADDENDUM: Several reviews I read were thickly frosted with concern-trolling about the portrayal of working-class whites in #HillbillyElegy. I don't recall that being a problem for Winter's Bone (94%) or The Fighter (90%) or any other film.

https://twitter.com/JoshuaTMcCabe/status/1340684124449878017