Hillbilly Elegy                      2 stars

Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy is the screen adaptation of the J.D. Vance memoir about his life growing up in a dysfunctional family in Middletown, Ohio, but with roots in the hills of eastern Kentucky. We see J.D. in two parallel timelines, one as a teenager dealing with his abusive drug addicted mother Bev (Amy Adams) and the other as a Yale Law School student called home to handle his mother’s latest episode of a heroin overdose. The movie is a series of abusive situations in which the family reacts to Mom’s explosive temper, brought on by a lifetime of disappointments. The acting by Adams and especially Glenn Close as the Mamaw, the matriarch of the family is realistic. Close has been transformed with a wig and baggy T-shirts into a gruff meanspirited grandmother who uses tough love to keep her grandchildren from falling into the pattern of failure familiar to her family. (Though there is a scene where she sets her husband on fire, but never mind that.) Close deserves the Academy Award nomination she received for the role. Unfortunately, it takes more than good acting to make a good movie so Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t deserve the same praise and is hard to watch as the characters put themselves through such misery. I didn’t read the book which is reputed to be a social commentary on poor working-class white America. Sadly, the many social and political issues raised in the book did not carry over into the movie that can be described as a series of face-slapping, door-slamming and drug fueled abusive scenes. It’s a collection of talented actors in a movie in search of a purpose. The director of Cinderella Man and The Da Vinci Code has missed the mark with this one.