Law student J.D. Vance (Gabriel Basso) is at a prospective law firm dinner wearing his best suit and trying to tell the butter knife from the fish knife when his phone rings: it’s his sister (Haley Bennett), who tells him through a cracking voice that “she’s using again… heroin”. A flashback and he’s a teenager: holding his mother’s (Amy Adams) hand as she sobs on the bed.
This, it’s quickly established through flashbacks and ponderous narration, is a story about cycles, about what’s repeated and played out, over and over, through the generations. About breaking those cycles and the effort it takes.
It’s a recognisable story, one originally told in J.D. Vance’s 2016 bestselling memoir of the same name — a book that for some told the truth about the American white working class, and for others dealt in too-easy narratives of poverty, escape and redemption.
It’s a problem that extends to this screen adaptation. All the necessary ingredients are present and correct: addiction, abuse, neglect, an absent father, a town in rust-belt Ohio where “something was missing, maybe hope”, a boy who dreams of a different life.
Head of the family is J.D.’s grandmother Mamaw (Glenn Close), who ran away from home when she got “knocked up” at 13. The daughter she was carrying grew up to be addict Bev, J.D.’s mother, who then herself had him at 18. Both women are physically transformed with impressive prosthetics (and home videos at the film’s close reveal that likeness is definitely achieved). And when it comes to performance, neither Close nor Adams flinch from portraying the ugliness of these women, however shocking.
“I wouldn’t spit on her ass if her guts were on fire,” says Mamaw in a kinder moment about a neighbour she dislikes. She’s foul-mouthed, brash and has her own violent streak (in one flashback she sets fire to her drunk husband). Bev is somehow worse: mean, spiteful and selfish — when she’s not sacrificing her kids’ needs for those of her latest boyfriend, she’s physically assaulting them.
Throughout, this is a story told generically, with dialogue that is the stuff of motivational Instagram quotes.
This commitment to unpalatable honesty may suggest authenticity, but that’s not what is delivered. Neither woman comes into focus, is known by either us or themselves. They remain roughly hewn; sharp, painful edges only. They lack motivation, nuance or any sense of internal conflict that would make them flesh and blood.
We see them failing as mothers, as girlfriends and wives, but we never see them, even privately, for a moment just as women. It isn’t a need to make them sympathetic (and Close does have softer moments to play with), it’s a need to make them feel real. A feat the film never manages.
It’s an issue that stains everything. In brutal detail we see J.D.’s traumatic childhood experiences (and Owen Asztalos is compelling as the younger J.D.); trauma that would have likely made him complicated and troubled as a man, but none of this makes it into his characterisation — J.D. remains flat, without definition or even much complexity.
Flashes of rage hint at what is passed on through families that live in trauma, but it’s never fully explored. More effort is made to show the specific shame that those raised in poverty carry with them, but it’s reduced to cliché in a scene where J.D. doesn’t know which wine he should order or which cutlery to use.
Throughout, this is a story told generically, with dialogue that is the stuff of motivational Instagram quotes and embroidered wall-hangings: “My family’s not perfect, but they made me who I am” / “The only damn thing that counts is family.”
There is a sense that the film is so determined to follow a traditional survivor’s arc, complete with third-act redemption, that it discards what came before. Complications, complexities, difficulties are flattened with clichés and tropes, leaving the story in its entirety ringing false.
And there really is nothing left unsaid — everything is spelled out in narration or dialogue, clumsily reinforced when action would have done the job perfectly well. J.D.s girlfriend Usha (Freida Pinto) is seemingly only in the film to be on the receiving end of exposition and explanation (and my word, is Pinto woefully underserved).
Here’s the frustration: this, with the most excellent of Hollywood talent attached, could have been a film that did and said so much more. About the opioid crisis in America, about the lifelong impact of poverty, about the severe intergenerational effects of trauma. It could have told its story with heart and heft and humanity. That could have been the legacy.
