Hillbilly Elegy Is A Hollywood Movie. Get over it.
It’s not very good, but it’s not a “dumpster fire.”
Presumably you’ve heard about film adaptation of J.D. Vance’s bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which premiered on Netflix on November 24. Presumably you’ve heard that it’s the worst movie ever made.
At least you’ve heard this if you’re on Twitter. For at least two weeks before the film began streaming, the Twitterverse, propelled by a few early and scathing reviews, was busy signaling its derision for the film. The usual finely-tuned social media critiques were invoked: garbage, trash, yikes.
At that point, few if any of these would-be critics had actually seen the film. Scrolling through many of the tweets, it also appeared that few of them had read Vance’s book. Most of the antipathy appeared to be directed at Vance himself, whose personal story of overcoming massive family dysfunction (and not a little personal dysfunction) via the Marine Corps and then scholarships to Ohio State University and Yale Law School has been interpreted by some leftists as up-by-the-bootstraps conservative rhetoric.
That reaction largely came in the form of backlash to what was initially an exuberant reception to the book. (I myself reviewed it favorably in The New York Times Book Review in October of 2016.)…
