Hillbilly Elegy and "Hillbilly Elegy": a two-fer review

Glenn Close as Mamaw and Amy Adams as Bev

2016's Hillbilly Elegy is an autobiographical memoir by JD Vance, who is currently making news as Donald Trump's running mate in the tumultuous 2024 presidential election. The book was a bestseller when it came out, earning praise from both critics and regular readers for its unflinching portrayal of life among the Scots-Irish hill folk who largely populate the Appalachians, with a particular focus on Vance's own family—its history and demography—running from Kentucky to Ohio. Largely a sociological study with narrative elements, Vance's book surveys who these hillbillies are, what values they hold, stereotypes about the hillbillies (and the degree to which those stereotypes are true or untrue, e.g., the role of religion among these folk), and Vance's own existence, with his life from childhood through the military, college, and graduate school serving as a sort of framework holding all of this information together. Vance prominently mentions one of his law professors at Yale, Amy Chua (author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) as a major inspiration for writing his book.

In terms of the "characters" who figure the most in Vance's life, there's his mother Bev (never called Beverly in the book), his grandparents Mamaw and Papaw (Bonnie and Jim Vance), and his level-headed older sister Lindsay. Otherwise, very little about JD's life is stable or consistent—not even his own name, in which the JD varies from James Donald to James David. (Donald is his father's name, but JD's father abandoned the family early on, reappearing later. David is an uncle.) Bev went through a slew of men, many of whom already had their own kids, so JD grew up with a confusingly rotating set of "brothers" and "sisters" and "cousins." JD often found himself in the role of big brother, little brother, or whatever the current familial configuration called for.

The book explores the weird sense of honor that hillbillies have—their sensitivity to insult and their willingness to harm those who might besmirch their dignity, even if the slight is only a perceived one and not a real one. Stability comes in the form of Mamaw and Papaw's insistence that JD study hard, get himself an education, and make something of himself. JD's mom, with her addictions and her rotating stable of lovers, seems fairly hopeless as a parent, and big sister Lindsay—who ends up all right—does what she can to shield JD from the worst aspects of hillbilly existence. Vance also comes back to the theme that hillbilly existence doesn't necessarily prepare a hillbilly to handle the real world; it's only after he escapes his rural life to join the military and to study at college that Vance becomes aware of the true complexity of the human universe around him.

Ultimately, yes: JD Vance joins the Marines, goes to a decent college, then ends up at Yale Law for graduate school. His book argues, explicitly and implicitly, that hillbilly culture is mired in problems largely of its own making, but at one point Vance takes time to aver that he is "not a policy skeptic" and wouldn't mind seeing government programs that are actually helpful for his demographic. The memoir is a combination of cold analysis and heartfelt retelling of painful personal and social realities. I found Hillbilly Elegy to be slow going for about a third of its length, but once Vance had gotten most of the sociological material out of the way to concentrate on the more personal narrative (including meeting his future wife Usha, his "Yale spirit guide"), the narrative gathered momentum and became more interesting.

Vance is still fairly young; his book ends on a note of youthful optimism. He doesn't see hillbillies' futures as predetermined, and he also finds good things about the hillbilly existence that he has been able to carry forward in his own life—although how much these "good things" are products of hillbilly culture and how much are products of his individual existence are unclear. The book does a fairly good job of striking a balance between a soaring overview of a sociological phenomenon and an intensely personal recollection.

Having finished the book, I moved on to seeing Ron Howard's movie version of it: 2020's "Hillbilly Elegy," starring Gabriel Basso as the young-adult JD Vance, Owen Asztalos as young JD, Amy Adams as wayward mom Bev, Glenn Close as Mamaw, Bo Hopkins as Papaw, Haley Bennett as big sis Lindsay, and Freida Pinto as Usha.

While the movie mirrors much that is in the book, it largely drops the sociological commentary to concentrate on JD's own life. As in the book, the focus is mostly on JD, Mamaw, Papaw, Lindsay, and Bev, with Bev in particular being given more attention than the other adult family members—a fact I found bizarre given Vance's own stress on the importance of his grandparents (who did not live to see him join the military) in his life. Those liberties aside, I thought Howard's movie was fairly faithful to the book's overall tone: the self-inflicted misery of hillbilly existence and the poor life-choices made by everyone around JD, as well as by JD himself early on.

It would be easy and tempting to dismiss everyone in the movie as stupid, ignorant trailer-park trash, but the movie does try to put forward the idea that there are karmic forces at work, both at the personal and the collective level. Life is more complex than it might appear at first. Howard's film gives us a sense that hillbillies are a people, and they have a culture. While some of the vignettes shown have a ring of ridiculousness about them (e.g., Bev's operatic, theatrical, and narcissistic rages that occasionally risk JD's life), Howard doesn't drag the movie in the direction of parody, satire, or any other form of comedy. This isn't like the typical rural horror movie where all the locals are sinister inbreds blessed or cursed with low, predatory cunning. We can relate to the characters in Howard's film: people trying to get through the day on very little—little education, little money, and few opportunities.

If there's one area where Howard's film made an impression not made by the book, it was in how it drove home the fact that, despite what I just wrote above about being able to relate to the main characters on a human level, I found most aspects of hillbilly existence to be, well, repugnant. Granted, we are all a product of our own backgrounds, but my background includes some people—maybe you could call them family members—who had mannerisms and beliefs that reminded me strongly of what I was watching as "Hillbilly Elegy" unfolded. And it's a kind of existence I'm only too happy to have gotten away from—not that there was ever any danger of my being trapped by it.

Glenn Close as Mamaw is one to watch. I had worried, at first, that she'd over-glamorize the role of JD's grandmother with her sheer acting talent and star power, but Close plays the role with an earthy realism, showing on her face the pressure of trying to raise JD right as she teaches him a sometimes-contradictory set of values related to family, addiction, and education. Amy Adams as Bev is deliberately unsexy, and I had to wrestle with how much I pitied or scorned the character. Bev gets a character arc, though: a title card at the end of the film claims she's been sober for six years, implying that she's straightened out her life, and that happy endings don't just belong to JD.

Overall, both the book and the movie are fairly depressing, albeit ultimately uplifting, leaving the reader/watcher with a sense of hope, and a feeling that one's background doesn't have to be one's destiny. The movie is a Hollywoodized version of the book, but it remains essentially faithful to the book's tone despite some of the liberties it takes along the way. I'd probably recommend the book over the movie, mainly for the sociological commentary that Vance provides as he discusses hillbilly culture, but the movie isn't a bad distillation of the book.

And hats off to the makeup artists who made Glenn Close look so much like the real Mamaw. As the movie closes, we see video footage of the real JD Vance and his family. I have to wonder what people who read the book in 2016 and saw the movie in 2020 think of Vance now.