Hillbilly Elegy

Why did Amy Adams and Glenn Close choose to do such a bad movie?

Hillbilly Elegy is objectively terrible.

Adams and Close deserved better than this relentlessly gloomy, often trite, movie. We all did.

There's only a vague message about bootstraps and personal responsibility, and a whole lot of bad wigs.

Hillbilly Elegy and its Oscar dreams are all sizzle, no steak.

Hillbilly Elegy is an Oscar-friendly narrative of personal triumph in the face of great hardship, a movie designed to end with an uplifting epigraph; it is also one of the worst movies of the year.

A dreary grind.

... The film remains an almost pornographic exhibition of a mother's collapse and an immodest presentation of Vance himself as a self-made hero. [Full review in Spanish]

Compared to Glenn Close's Grandma Hillbilly -- excuse me, “Mamaw” -- even Ruth Gordon’s foul-mouthed bellowing as Ma in Every Which Way But Loose looks positively somnambular.

The result is a distasteful and expensive poverty safari, where we can look at the less fortunate from a distance for a short while, before driving off and forgetting about them entirely.