Five years after adapting J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” for Netflix, Ron Howard seems to have moved on from thinking much about the memoir, or its author—who, in the years that followed, went from bestselling writer to Donald Trump’s VP.
Speaking to Vulture, in a sprawling look back at his career, the two-time Oscar-winning director admitted that Vance’s political shift “remains a bit of a surprise to me,” recalling the cordial time they spent together promoting the film in 2020.
“I don’t think about it,” Howard said of the movie, noting its sharply divided reception.
I know it’s a mixed bag and probably quite culturally divided. I also know that reviews were bad and the audience-reaction rating was pretty good.
As for fact that the Vance he worked with and the one now serving under Trump, Howard replied, “It’s happened, so I know what I’ve observed. I would not have seen it coming, and I wouldn’t have expected his rhetoric to be as divisive as it sometimes is. By the way, I’m not following him or listening to every word.”
Based on Vance’s 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy” followed a Yale Law student (Gabriel Basso) returning to his Appalachian hometown to confront generational cycles of poverty, abuse, and addiction.
Released in 2022, “Hillbilly Elegy” was not just critically panned but “greeted with intense online mockery.” It was all overdone. It’s not a strong film, but neither is it a bad one, it’s probably somewhere in between. Filled with stellar performances and a story cooked out of ‘90s American moviemaking, audiences seemed to disagree with the critical assessment of “Hillbilly Elegy” (Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score: 25 percent. Audience score: 83 percent.)
The film, also starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close, was liked enough by the Academy’s acting branch to earn Close an Oscar nomination. Following Trump’s VP announcement, viewership spiked in a single day, jumping from 1.5M to 19.2M minutes watched.
According to Vance’s best friend from Yale, Jamil Jivani, the criticism of the film, which he deemed to be politically motivated and malevolent, was the “last straw” in his “falling-out with elites,” and he would soon start to side more and more with Trump in his political distaste for the “establishment.”
When first published, Vance’s book was embraced by both conservatives and liberals as a window into the alienation of the white working class. That bipartisan embrace now seems like a relic of another era.