Ron Howard didn’t have a particularly good 2010s. Sure, Rush turned out pretty well, and his Beatles documentary was fantastic, but for the most part, his narrative films were mixed at best. The Dilemma was a tonal nightmare, In The Heart Of The Sea was entirely forgettable, Inferno made for a crappy finale to an already-mockable trilogy, and Solo… well, it was fun for what it was, but in hindsight, it’s also an example of just how non-essential Disney-era Star Wars has turned out. Whenever Howard’s movies succeeded, it was largely down to his talent for visuals managing to overcome the writing problems, and even then, that didn’t always work out. So what happens when Ron Howard makes a down-to-earth drama that doesn’t allow him to tap into his sense for panoramic grandeur? You get one of his worst-ever features.
It’s a bad sign when not even genuinely good acting is able to pull it out of the dirt. Amy Adams and Glenn Close are putting everything into these roles, and to their credit, they fully become one with their characters, and in lesser hands, I’m still convinced that this could’ve turned out even worse without them. Shame that they aren’t the main characters, though. Instead, it’s Gabriel Basso as Adams’ son and Close’s grandson J. D. Vance, a dramatised version of the writer for the source material. And when he isn’t getting consistently bowled over by pretty much anyone he shares screen-time with, he’s providing voice-over narration that only adds noise to the proceedings.
Story-wise, this adaptation of Vance’s memoir is cut from the same cloth as The Glass Castle, with childhood and adulthood intercut as the audience watches someone come to terms with how unhealthy their family life was/is. Except, where Glass Castle took an all-encompassing approach to that idea and admitted that completely isolating one’s family as entirely ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is easier said than done, this basically takes the easiest thematic route possible to get that point across.
The depiction we get of Vance’s home is that of hick central, where everyone from the viewer to the people living there just gawk at the freakshow spectacle on display. It’s a place to escape from, not to exist in, and with how painfully caricatured these characters are, from Adams as the heroin junkie to Close as the old racist, it feels like the filmmakers are intentionally stacking the deck to make the inevitable decision to break off from the family unit as artificially simple as possible.
I freely admit to not having read Vance’s memoir for myself, but considering he is also credited as producer on this… there’s something incredibly suss about this entire operation. Something about taking the American lower-class, parading them around as victims of their own actions without bringing in any kind of societal circumstance into the equation, and then making bank off that on two separate fronts is astoundingly unsavoury to me. “My future is our shared legacy”, my arse!
If this told with any kind of empathetic eye, where Adams and Close are portraying something other than walking opportunities for the watching middle-class to count their blessings that at least they aren’t like them, the main point of the film could’ve worked. Again, Glass Castle did really damn well with that, and that was in spite of some pretty extreme tonal issues. But instead, because it’s all being told through such a plain-faced condescending perspective, it makes me feel unclean having watched the bloody thing. I wasn’t all that crazy about Ron Howard to begin with, but holy shit, did I not realise he was capable of something this bad.
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