Movie Trailer, 'Hillbilly Elegy' By Ron Howard, Based on J.D. Vance's Book; 'The New Deliverance'

- 'Glenn Close, Amy Adams serve Appalachian angst in first Hillbilly Elegy trailer.' J.D. Vance's novel comes to the screen via Netflix and director Ron Howard. By Joey Nolfi October 14, 2020, EW.

Gird your loins: You've never seen Glenn Close and Amy Adams quite like this before. The Oscar-nominated duo leads the first trailer for Ron Howard's upcoming drama Hillbilly Elegy as an Appalachian mother-daughter pair whose volatile relationship changes the course of a young man's life.

Based on author J.D. Vance's book of the same same, Hillbilly Elegy follows the writer (played by Gabriel Basso), a former Marine from southern Ohio and current Yale Law student, who's on the verge of landing a prestigious job when a family crisis coaxes him back to the homeland he's long tried to purge from his life. There, he's forced back into a harsh dynamic of grappling with his mother Bev's (Adams) drug addiction balanced with memories of the whip-smart grandmother, Mamaw (Close), who raised him.

Awards pundits have speculated that Howard's film could be a major player in the upcoming Oscar race, particularly for the performances of Close and Adams, both of whom have received multiple Academy Award nods despite never winning. *Netflix debut Nov. 24, 2020...https://ew.com/movies/hillbilly-elegy-trailer/

- 'Hillbilly Elegy' Official Trailer; Netflix debut Nov. 24, 2020.
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- 'Can the 'Hillbilly Elegy' movie do any good for Appalachia?' By Meredith McCarroll, Columbia Journalism Review, 2019.

..I thought of Deliverance recently, after Netflix secured the film rights to JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy in a $45 million deal. Hillbilly Elegy, published a few months before the 2016 presidential election, became an answer to didactic questions of Trump’s win, which were framed in terms of red and blue, urban and rural.

Vance’s story is compelling—poor kid raised in Ohio with roots in Kentucky is shuffled back and forth by his addicted mother, joins the Marines, goes to college, ends up at Yale Law School—and he tells it as a classic bootstraps myth. It is the story of one man’s way out of a dying place. But Vance goes further to say that not only did he make it without much help, nobody in Appalachia will take any help anyway. Part memoir and part pseudo-sociology, Vance makes claims for all of Appalachia—chiefly, that poverty in the region is no one else’s fault.

Vance told his story as though it were more than just his own; as his subtitle signals, Hillbilly Elegy is a “Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis.” Following publication, Vance became a media celebrity and the unofficial spokesperson for Appalachia, a CNN contributor and, for a brief moment, a potential US Senate candidate. (He announced early last year that he would not run.) As a talking point to people from Appalachia, Hillbilly Elegy became the new Deliverance.

Hillbilly Elegy also met with an uproar from people invested in Appalachia—as natives, citizens, scholars, and protectors. The writing that followed Vance’s book and challenged his narrative was almost worth the pain that produced it. As Hillbilly Elegy climbed best-seller lists, writers invested in Appalachia pushed back against the way that the book was being used to explain the region. It offered a too-easy answer. Op-eds, blog posts, rants, and analyses opened up new exchanges about Appalachia. Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia complicated a conversation that had been stuck on repeat, and that had focused on doomed industries and “brain drain” rather than supporting solutions.

Writers such as Ivy Brashear told Vance to keep his elegy. Scholars such as TRC Hutton offered a historian’s analysis of the book. It started to feel like Vance’s elegy had inadvertently catalyzed an awakening of Appalachian voices—sometimes angry, sometimes joyful in their reclamation, a chorus that might just drown out the “hillbilly” turned venture capitalist who kept stepping to the mic.

There should be no first Appalachian. There should be a wide pool of people to speak up about Appalachia...

Read More, https://www.cjr.org/opinion/hillbilly-elegy-jd-vance-film.php