I was a lot less harsh than your average critic on Hillbilly Elegy, Ron Howard's 2020 Netflix movie that brought J.D. Vance's memoir of the same name to the screen. I thought the movie had its uneven parts -- Amy Adams in particular didn't know how to modulate her performance correctly -- but overall I thought it was a reasonably competent, reasonably sympathetic depiction of a story worth telling, even though the occasional broad strokes muddied its prospects for success. After all, Howard has proven himself much more than a competent director -- which doesn't mean he's incapable of misstep, only that we should consider it a lot more closely before we accuse him of such. I gave the movie a 5/10 on ReelGood. You can get the gist of my thoughts in my review.
In giving it a not-quite-but-almost positive review, I no doubt had a fair amount of sympathy for Vance, the intelligent young man who got into Yale Law School but was constantly called back to Kentucky to look after his junkie mother (Adams). This conflict almost, but did not quite, kneecap his career trajectory. In his clear desire to get out of an environment that obviously narrowed his own prospects, Vance had been cast as a bit of a low-level hero in my mind -- someone who didn't feel superior to his upbringing, but also knew he couldn't let it define him. If you asked me to break it down to its political roots, he was a Republican yearning to become a Democrat.
Boy did I get that wrong.
In my email this morning I saw Vance's name pop up again for the first time in a while. I might have seen it sooner had I been following U.S. politics a bit more closely, but I'm still on kind of an extended break after the 2020 election -- a luxury I can, and do, indulge by virtue of living halfway across the world.
This morning's email was from Tim Ryan, Democratic candidate for the Ohio senate seat being vacated by the retiring Republican Rob Portman. The line that caught my attention was "My opponent JD Vance called overturing Roe a 'victory' and said pregnancy from rape is merely 'inconvenient.'"
The name was familiar to me, in part because of my own nickname, Vance, and the fact that I have a good friend named JD. I pointed out to him at the time that this guy was a mixture of our two names.
I thought it was the Hillbilly Elegy guy, but it didn't seem like it could be -- not according to the idea of this guy I had in my head, a guy who attended Yale Law School and ended up marrying an Indian classmate. Being pro-life didn't fit my notion of this man.
But yes, it was. Wikipedia tells me he's always been Republican but was critical of Trump in 2020, referring to himself as a Never Trumper. However, he's since gotten the itch for politics and has gone to Mar-a-Lago to kneel at the throne of Trump, to apologize for his previous transgressions and to get Trump's blessing. Which Trump has given. And now Vance has won the Republican primary to replace Portman.
"Reprehensible" is a strong word, and I would not apply it to anybody who is pro-life. I have friends who are pro-life, and though I don't love their opinion on this topic, I still love them. You can't just rule out anybody in your life who differs in your opinion on something, even something as foundational as this.
But I use the word because of Vance's comments. Here's the full quote I find so distasteful:
"It's not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it's whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child's birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society." Vance said this last September.
The word "inconvenient" is objectionable and the word "somehow" just makes it that much worse.
Let's set aside the obviously problematic word "inconvenient" for a moment and focus on the "somehow." The qualifier suggests that rape is "somehow" inconvenient -- as though rape is not objectionably inconvenient, but only inconvenient from a certain point of view. Again, we know "inconvenient" is a terrible choice of words, but we're setting that aside for now.
Translated: "You liberals seem to think rape is inconvenient, but every child born is part of God's plan."
Some people truly believe this. Some people think "Your brother would not have impregnated you unless God had a plan for that child." This is also part of a presumption that if God exists, he could never be fallible.
I don't want to get into the weeds of the argument. More, I want to talk about how I feel like I was taken in by the narrative Vance sold me in Hillbilly Elegy -- as was Ron Howard, a political liberal.
Last month Howard said he was surprised by some of the positions Vance had taken and his move toward far right politics -- indicating, to me anyway, that he thought he was in bed with someone only moderately Republican, not rabidly so. "I always knew he was conservative, but he struck me as very center-right, a kind of moderate thinker."
Translated: "You asshole, why the hell did you associate my name with your brand of right-wing hatred?"
It's a tricky area. It can be argued that one of the biggest areas Hollywood needs to diversify is in the core political assumptions of its cinematic output. I don't know that I'm arguing that, but it's reasonable to argue it. It's extremely rare to see any sort of movie that contains even the slightest conservative agenda. It usually has to be heavily encoded if the filmmaker wants to put it there. (I'm sure there are plenty of conservative agendas encoded into Clint Eastwood's directorial body of work, but he's smart enough to bury them under the surface so that they only function as dog whistles for like-minded partisans in the viewing audience.)
So in a way, I saw Howard's attempt to work with Vance -- whose basic political outlook he understood at the time he accepted the project -- as a step in that direction. Hollywood shouldn't want to disenfranchise Republicans, and of course in its biggest projects, it doesn't -- one of the reasons Top Gun is doing so well is that it is as friendly to Republicans as it is to Democrats, maybe even more so. But Republicans are almost 100% disenfranchised from independent filmmaking, which Hillbilly Elegy essentially is. Maybe calling it "small-scale dramatic filmmaking," since Howard is one of Hollywood's most successful directors and isn't really "independent" (never has been), is more accurate.
But Howard put himself out there, made a movie that most critics and some audiences hated, and two years later, has been bitten for it by a man who says of abortions in the case of incest: "Two wrongs don't make a right."
I'm glad Vance finds incest wrong at least.
I wonder if another big director will be so eager to take that step again. How are more center-leaning conservative values ever going to be brought to a larger audience if the few initial attempts are hijacked by the right wing?
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