When the news broke earlier this week that former president and 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump had picked Ohio senator and Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance as his running mate, I knew I had no choice but to go back and familiarize myself with the text.
Well, not the book itself (I’m not that much of a masochist), but the 2020 film directed by Ron Howard that starred Amy Adams and Glenn Close as Vance’s mother and grandmother. Below, find every thought I had about the Netflix version of Hillbilly Elegy:
- Hey, a tiny frog!
- What’s with all these close-up animal shots? Is this The Tree of Life?
- Honestly, I wish this movie was directed by Terrence Malick. Sorry, Ron Howard, but…two minutes in, I’m already looking at my watch.
- J.D. Vance voiceover time!
- Is this man…going to be the vice president of the United States?
- Aw, he tried to save a turtle. He’s not like the other boys; he’s nice, you see.
- Amy Adams, as J.D.’s mom!
- Glenn Close! In one of the wildest wigs I’ve ever seen her in!
- God, I would not have dealt well with being a rural male child in the ’90s.
- What can I say, I was built for the softer things in life (i.e. big-city female bullying in the aughts).
- Okay, we get it, the family’s big.
- Middletown, Ohio! Despite being a gay leftist elite, I’ve spent some time there; does that qualify me to be vice president?
- Oh, sweet Hans Zimmer, why did you let yourself be involved with this film?
- I do like the phrase “I wouldn’t spit on her ass if her guts were on fire," especially the way Glenn Close delivers it.
- J.D.’s at Yale Law now…how does that square with his whole conservative-populist thing, I wonder?
- Oh look, it’s Usha Vance.
- I would have more sympathy for J.D. feeling “othered” at Yale if he hadn’t gone on to be a neoconservative racist, but I see what they’re trying to do here narratively.
- Ooh, these tips from Usha on how to act at a fancy dinner are actually helpful. (I never heard the thing about starting with the outside fork and moving inward!)
- Ugh, J.D.’s mom OD’ed.
- “Come on, Mom, I’m watching Gore.” Totally likely thing for a child to say!
- I’m not getting a great vibe from J.D.’s mom’s cop boyfriend.
- Oof, this mother/son fight scene is brutal, even for someone who (like me) remains unmoved by the narrative this film is trying to establish.
- Damn, this flashback of J.D.’s mom getting fired while roller-skating high through the hospital where she works is crazy.
- Oof, I feel like J.D. introducing his Indian girlfriend to his mom is not going to go well.
- Another good Mamaw line, I have to admit: “Kiss my ruby-red asshole.” Can I pull that one off in average conversation?
- Ooh, young J.D. and his new stepbrother have just discovered weed.
- Are these bad little kids…huffing?
- Ah, tween vandalism; a constant of young life everywhere from New York City to rural Kentucky, even if it is expressed differently. (For example, my fifth-grade best friend and I once got in trouble for dropping a third friend’s chess trophy out an eighth-floor apartment window.)
- OMG, a Texas Instruments calculator! Good times. (Actually, awful times in math class, but nostalgia is powerful.)
- Another upsetting almost-OD from J.D.’s mom.
- Okay, well, that was…what’s the phrase I m looking for?
- Oh, right, “profoundly mid trauma porn designed to let guilty liberals microdose working-class suffering without actually having to meaningfully acknowledge the systemic inequality that creates it.”
- I’m just going to leave this list of books about Appalachia that aren’t by J.D. Vance right here.
