There is much we still don’t know about J.D. Vance’s personal politics, but one thing seems certain: The scathing response to the 2020 movie that told the story of his life, “Hillbilly Elegy,” turned the Republican vice presidential candidate against Hollywood, and further turned him against the mainstream media.
When the movie directed by Ron Howard and produced by Brian Grazer came out in November 2020, days after the presidential election won by Joe Biden and contested by Donald Trump, critics were unforgiving, and fairly unanimous.
The movie depicted Vance’s family background in Appalachia, riven by addiction, poverty and the rupture of the family unit. It held a message of personal responsibility in chronicling Vance’s rise above disadvantaged circumstances. Democrats like Hillary Clinton had already praised the book as a window into the dissatisfaction in rural, white America that led to Trump’s 2016 election.
But critics and others said the movie pandered to stereotypes and parodied the very real pain of people in the region. They also noted that Vance is from Middleton, Ohio, rather than Kentucky, where his grandparents lived.
Vance was personally wounded, two insiders told TheWrap. He had worked closely with the producers on the film, visiting the set and telling them that Glenn Close had faithfully captured his beloved “Mamaw,” Bonnie Vance.
“I’m done with Hollywood,” Vance declared after the barrage of withering and personally embarrassing reviews, according to the two people who were close to the film.
“He had put himself out there,” said one of the insiders. “He felt he had worked hard.” A second insider said he was embarrassed at the vitriol against his personal story.
Reviews were particularly scathing and personal.
The Atlantic’s David Sims called it “one of the worst movies of the year.” The headline of the Forbes’ review was “Pandering Poverty Porn,” not dissimilar from The A.V. Club’s Katie Rife who called it “bootstrapping poverty porn” that “reinforces the stereotypes it insists it’s illuminating.”
The L.A. Times’ Pulitzer-winning critic Justin Chang called the film “woefully misguided.” He wrote: “Directed by Ron Howard and denuded of any meaningful politics to speak of, ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ is an extended Oscar-clip montage in search of a larger purpose, an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics.”
Alissa Wilkinson at Vox wrote: “It is distractingly Hollywoodified, a rich person’s idea of what it is like to be a poor person, a tone-deaf attempt to assuage a very particular kind of liberal guilt by reifying the very thing that caused the guilt in the first place. And, perhaps worst of all, it’s a very dull movie.”
Echoing the others, TheWrap wrote: “It isn’t interested in the systems that create poverty and addiction and ignorance; it just wants to pretend that one straight white guy’s ability to rise above his surroundings means that there’s no excuse for everyone else not to have done so as well.”
The movie sunk to an abysmal 25% score on Rotten Tomatoes, a blend of dozens of reviews. Close earned both an Oscar and a Razzie nomination for her portrayal of Mamaw.
That was a stunning comedown for a movie based on a New York Times bestselling book published in 2016, as media and other “elites” – as Vance is fond of saying – were struggling to understand the appeal of Donald Trump to the white working class.
After a bidding war, Netflix blew other rival bids away by offering almost double the next bidder, with a deal for beloved director Ron Howard to take on with his producing partner Grazer. They spent $45 million on the budget.
Oddly enough, “Hillbilly Elegy’s” release coincided with Vance’s political turn towards Trump. The Republican vice presidential candidate had once been an inveterate critic, speculating in a text to a former roommate that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” In 2016, he’d voted for independent candidate Evan McMullin, according to Time magazine who interviewed Vance in 2021.
Some time after the 2020 election, Vance pivoted. In March 2021, he and Trump met for an hour in a meeting brokered by Vance’s friend and former boss Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley power broker and political libertarian who gave $10 million to a super PAC on Vance’s behalf.
Vance understood that he needed to reverse his opposition to Trump. Trump is “the leader of this movement,” Vance told the Time reporter in July 2021, “and if I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him.”
Asked whether the 2020 election had been stolen, he said in that interview only that it had been “unfair.”
By the time Vance began his Senate campaign that summer, the candidate had become more definitive, openly seeking the endorsement of Trump as he ran against Josh Mandel, the Ohio state treasurer who was also a pro-Trump hard-liner.
“We have a fake country right now,” Vance told a reporter for The Vindicator, a newspaper in Mahoning County, Ohio, in October 2021. “There were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis.”
To be sure, Vance had long spoken out against the media. In a 2017 appearance at the University of Chicago, he said, “There’s a sense in which the fact that the people don’t trust the mainstream media is a symptom of some of these much broader cultural problems that we have, and the fact that they just feel disconnected from that entire grouping.”
It’s hardly innovative for a political figure to slam mainstream media; Trump has made a full time occupation of doing so, even while being notorious for personally leaking stories to reporters for decades.
But Vance’s turn away from Hollywood coincided not just with the movie’s rejection by critics and audiences, but also his need to hew close to Trump to get elected.
According to one of the insiders who spoke to TheWrap, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos tried to comfort Vance, telling him he personally loved the movie but noting: “It’s unfortunate the media did what they did.” A spokesperson for Sarandos said, “This was made up and never happened.”
Vance himself felt that the movie’s poor reception was related to his political turn. He felt badly enough to apologize to Howard and Grazer, according to one insider. “I’m sorry you guys worked so hard,” he said. “I’m done with Hollywood.”
Through a spokesperson, the Vance campaign declined to comment. Grazer and Howard also declined to comment.
Tess Patton contributed to this story.
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