The ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Film Is as Bad as Everyone Said It Was

This Week

Everyone’s watching Hillbilly Elegy on Netflix. I’m sorry.

Everyone should be watching Smash instead.

The most surreal week of news.

A new life goal.

Give this video every award.

Netflix and Scream Into the Void

American audiences are gluttons for punishment. That’s the only logical explanation for the repeated tendency to be warned, at great volume, that a piece of pop culture is abysmally terrible—and then flock to it anyway and make it bafflingly popular.

The latest example is the surge in popularity of the Netflix film Hillbilly Elegy, the 2020 cinematic abomination—er, excuse me… adaptation—of J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir.

Ron Howard’s film starred Gabriel Basso as Vance, a former Marine and Yale Law student, and Glenn Close and Amy Adams as his “Mamaw” and mother, whose addiction issues forces Vance to return to his Appalachia hometown and wrestle with his roots, just as he was trying to escape them.

Politics aside—and the politics are bad!—Hillbilly Elegy is an abysmal film, a blight on each of its stars’ and filmmakers’ careers.

This past week, it’s been climbing the ranks of Netflix’s most watched movies. At the time I’m writing this, it’s at No. 2 on the streamer’s chart, sandwiched in between the animated musical Trolls Band Together and Fifty Shades Freed, the final installment in the S&M “mommy porn” franchise. (I truly can’t think of a better, if woefully depressing, summation of American culture than that Top 3.)

If we’re being generous, the spike in interest in the film could be justified as a curiosity about a person who just became one of the most consequential figures in our country—and our lives. OK… that is actually a completely worthwhile, and perhaps even responsible, reason to seek out the project.

Whether people are hitting play on Hillbilly Elegy to pledge support for the newest member of the MAGA presidential ticket or to simply find out what the hell the deal is with this already polarizing figure who just became a lightning rod in an unprecedented storm, everyone is about to discover the same truth. (A rare moment of unity for our divided country!) That revelation: This movie is just as bad as everyone said it was.

The problem with Hillbilly Elegy, the film (we won’t even get into the book), is that it wasn’t even good enough to merit the raging discourse that it caused four years ago.

Cynically released in the weeks following a fraught election, the expectation was that the film would offer some perspective to a fractured America on those who live in a region of the country that is routinely dismissed. Optimistically, the movie might even rouse enough humanity to add clarity to the question, following Donald Trump’s victory, of “How did we get here?”

But Hillbilly Elegy was shockingly superficial, with Howard zooming past his sweet spot for generating compassion and crashing into an emotionally manipulative fiasco. The performances from Close and Adams amounted to borderline offensive Appalachia drag: a conflagration of garish wigs, labored accents, and histrionic speechifying.

Even people from the region decried how the film depicts them, joining critics in their dismay over its abject lack of empathy.

“Hillbilly Elegy isn’t interested in the systems that create poverty and addiction and ignorance; it just wants to pretend that one straight white guy’s ability to rise above his surroundings means that there’s no excuse for everyone else not to have done so as well,” wrote The Wrap’s Alonso Duralde in his review.

“Directed by Ron Howard and denuded of any meaningful politics to speak of, Hillbilly Elegy is an extended Oscar-clip montage in search of a larger purpose, an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang. “These characters are trapped... in generational cycles of dysfunction, deprivation and hopelessness. Those patterns are also cultural and structural, though unlike its source material, Hillbilly Elegy seems curiously uninterested in the underlying causes, let alone the possible solutions.”

Of course, those pans were met with dismissal from some rural Americans who felt the reviews were classist cannonballs flung at them from coastal ivory towers. (One user of what was then Twitter even commented on each critic’s reviews “calling them out” as being from Los Angeles or New York. Their page no longer exists.)

When I interviewed Howard in 2022, he told me he was “surprised” by the backlash the film received: “Audience reactions were good. Even people from the region, in the test audiences, understood it and appreciated it for the level of authenticity that we achieved and which we were going for. With that film, as you well know, reviewers and others were tougher on it. And they brought whatever filter they were looking at it through. The movie frustrated them in certain ways.”

Hillbilly Elegy sparked a class war that became more interesting than the movie itself. And that was four years ago, when Vance was nothing more than a seemingly well-intentioned writer. Now that he’s Donald Trump’s running mate, I respect the discourse over the resurgent movie to resemble less the fiery discussion that it incited four years ago, and something more akin to a debate version of that video where all of San Diego’s Fourth of July fireworks went off at once. And all over a movie that is, objectively, trash!

There’s a report that the critical thrashing that the film received from liberals radicalized Vance, the “last straw” that saw him going from a “moderate Never Trumper to insane MAGA Trumper.”

So in addition to offering my sincere condolences to anyone who felt moved to watch Hillbilly Elegy because of Vance’s recent job promotion, I guess what I want to say is sorry. I guess this is all my fault.

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Let This Show Be Your Star

Fade in on a girl (me.) With a hunger for fame (who wants you to read his story). And a face and a name to remember (no, I’m not related to Jimmy Fallon).

If those opening lyrics, albeit tweaked, to the Smash duet ballad “Let Me Be Your Star” still sends shivers up your spine, more than 12 years after they were first sung at the end of the show’s pilot, then this week has been Christmas in July. Even as the legend of the NBC series has grown among its cult-like fanbase, Smash has only been available to stream online through wonky, hard-to-access means. But this week, it finally took its opening bow on Peacock, with all episodes ready to watch.

And while I can’t in good conscience tell you to go screen each episode—it is a thrillingly rickety roller-coaster ride of quality—I can gift you this one piece of advice: Do yourself a favor and go watch the pilot episode. Immediately.

Smash centered on the creation of a new Broadway musical about the life of Marilyn Monroe, with the competition between veteran chorus girl Ivy (Megan Hilty) and newcomer Karen (Katherine McPhee) to be cast as Marilyn as the narrative backbone of Season 1. The premiere introduces the cast of characters—songwriters Julia (Debra Messing) and Tom (Christian Borle), producer Eileen (Anjelica Huston), director Derek (Jack Davenport), and the aspiring leading ladies—culminating in Ivy and Karen first audition, where they sing “Let Me Be Your Star.”

There are certain TV pilots that, no matter how far off the rails a series may go or how fans and critics may turn against it, are indisputably perfect. In my [redacted] years working as a critic, there are a handful that I was lucky to cover that I immediately think of: Girls, Modern Family, This Is Us, Game of Thrones, The Newsroom, Glee.

Remember, I’m talking about just the pilot. The wild places some of these shows went as the seasons sped along is none of my business—a caveat that perfectly segues into my proclamation that the first episode of Smash may actually be the best of the bunch.

The show’s debut on Peacock presents an interesting thought exercise: How would a show like Smash be received if it was released today in the age of streaming and a time when discourse has evolved to new levels of hateful scrutiny—even when compared to the dawn of the “hatewatch” era that Smash helped spawn a decade ago.

How would critics and social media users chronicle how artful, cinematic, and prestige the Smash premiere was, and how immediately and aggressively it became fucking weird?

I’m also tempted to wonder how today’s online culture would have churned out a tornado of content on the most unhinged and memorably “Smash-esque” storylines and moments.

What would they say about the ridiculous Uma Thurman arc, and what kind of attention would Messing’s outrageous scarves wardrobe receive? (And it got plenty of play back then!)

Before there was And Just Like That’s Che Diaz, the crown for most tyrannical LGBT character on TV belonged to Jaime Cepero’s Ellis. Imagine those thinkpieces.

But I also wonder if, in this time of splintered attention and copious streaming options, anyone would’ve watched at all, if it would be yet another ambitious, strange show that would come and go without a whisper.

Or, the opposite may have happened. We could have harnessed the power of social amplification to turn “Let Me Be Your Star” into the Number One hit it deserved to be. Megan Hilty would have performed “Just Keep Moving the Line” at the Emmys. Jennifer Hudson would have finished the arc that was originally written for her.

Now that it’s streaming, is there about to be a new Smash “moment”? I hope not. The show became reeeaaaallll terrible. But that pilot? That deserves resurgent attention again.

I’m Sensing a Pattern…

I’ve spent the week interviewing dozens of stars from fall TV’s best new shows and touring their film sets as part of the Television Critics Association summer tour in Los Angeles. It’s been a lot of fun! There’s going to be a lot of stories coming! And there’s been one very weird pattern that I can’t shake and need to discuss!

When news broke that Donald Trump had been shot and the video first hit X, I was at a press conference for the upcoming CBS prequel NCIS: Origins, where Mark Harmon was talking about his decision to return to the role of Special Agent Gibbs as the new show’s narrator. It was an admittedly surreal circumstance in which to learn about an assassination attempt on a former president, but I suppose truly any circumstance would be a strange way to receive that information.

Then, a few days later, the charming young cast of NCIS: Origins was showing me around the show’s set on the Paramount studio lot, where I received the news alert that Joe Biden has COVID.

All I’m saying is that, with all due respect to the cast and crew of this sure-to-be-hit show, I will not be tuning in live to the NCIS: Origins premiere on Oct. 14. Who knows what outrageous news would be awaiting me? I’m not superstitious, but let’s not tempt fate.

A New Dream

I’m at a point in my life and career where people often ask what I want next: What do I want to do? What is my goal? What would make me happy? I’ve never had a good answer…until now.
I aspire to reach the level of Famous Hot Gay where I hang out with Kylie Minogue before her concert and then get to carry her to the stage alongside a fellow Famous Hot Gay.

Congrats to Andrew Scott and Jonathan Bailey, who are soon to be my peers—once I learn how to do a situp.

A Masterpiece

I demand the Academy of Picture Arts and Science convene an emergency meeting to discuss how they plan to honor this perfect piece of cinema at the next Academy Awards. Please watch this recreation of Big standing up Carrie at their wedding from the Sex and the City movie using Barbies, and join me in the standing ovation for it that hasn’t stopped since I first watched the video four days ago.

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