Just a year after Hillbilly Elegy became a runaway success, Imagine Entertainment acquired rights to a film adaptation. The project has been plodding along since then, with Netflix winning a bidding war in January to finance the $45 million film.
In its latest development, the adaptation of J.D. Vance’s bestselling memoir has finally signed its first star: six-time Oscar nominee Amy Adams. The “Sharp Objects” and “Vice” actress may finally win her first Academy Award for the upcoming role, Vanity Fair speculated.
But since it came out in 2016, Hillbilly Elegy has generated mixed reactions. If Adams finally wins an award for her role in the feature, not everyone will be pleased.
Erin Keane, executive editor at Salon and Louisville, Ky., native responded to the news in a piece titled, “Amy Adams probably will win her Oscar for ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ and that’s a damn shame.” Keane called the story a “reductive” narrative that would play well with the self-satisfied Hollywood elite but would do no good for the Appalachians whose stories are told:
In Vance’s memoir, whose full title is Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, he describes his upbringing in the Rust Belt, before he joined the military and then graduated from Yale Law School. He expands the stories of his dysfunctional family and the gun-toting hillbillies he grew up with to a broader commentary on the opioid crisis and the white working class.
The book set off a wave of praise and criticism, with many conservatives applauding his explanation of Appalachia’s declining culture and liberals saying he blamed poor people for being poor. Vance’s memoir helped readers on the Left and Right alike make sense of the disillusionment that led many voters to swing for President Trump, but critics said his depiction of the poor, working class in Ohio and Kentucky was less than flattering.
When I read the book, though, I didn’t see it as a blow against Vance’s own culture. He seems to want to raise his own people up with him, to call out specific problems (infidelity, addiction, laziness) that are keeping good Americans down.
Keane is right that the film could become simplistic, and its description might be Oscar-bait. But Vance will be executive producing, and he has shown he’s not giving up on his home.
Two years ago, Vance wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled, “Why I’m Moving Home.” In it, he argued that to combat the problem of “brain drain,” where educated people leave the cities where they grew up, he was moving from Silicon Valley back to Ohio. He’s now the managing partner of Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, a venture capital fund that invests only in companies outside of Silicon Valley, New York City, and Boston.
Netflix’s “Hillbilly Elegy” adaptation will struggle to rise to the nuance of the book. As with “The Glass Castle,” Hollywood can take the energy of a memoir and fudge it to fit two hours of screen time. But if the upcoming feature can expose more viewers to Vance’s vision of investing back into Middle American communities, Adams can have no better film with which to win her Oscar.
