Unreadable book turned into unwatchable movie

The reviews for Yalie Peter Thiel Hedge Fund Elegy: The Movie! are in:

I am surprised it’s as bad as it is. Written for the screen by Vanessa Taylor (The Shape of Water, Hope Springs) and directed by Ron Howard, 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.

And while it seems inept even on its own terms, the biggest problem with the concept remains the source material:

I wanted to empathize with J.D. I am white and grew up in a family of healthcare workers, schoolteachers, and blue-collar employees in Cheviot, Ohio, 45 minutes south of Middletown. We drove through the tunnel seen in this film several times a month, en route to my grandparents’ house. I, too, worked my way through college at a state school, and have felt like an imposter in rooms full of people whose holiday bonuses could solve my entire family’s financial problems in one swoop. But I do know what the outer fork is for, and I guarantee you that J.D. Vance did, too, long before screenwriter Vanessa Taylor wrote a scene into this film where Vance breaks into a sweat in front of a set of formal dinnerware. (Please, let’s retire the extra-fork-as-class-signifier cliché—and take J.D.’s other major axis of oppression, only knowing one type of white wine, with it.) Like the book, the film version of Hillbilly Elegy goes for easy over honest every time, which is one reason why the former has been sharply criticized by those it claims to represent.

Another is that Vance seems perfectly happy to throw his own people under the bus in order to make his life fit a narrative about pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. One of the many frustrating things about this film is that it occasionally hits on a real issue—the pipeline from legal painkillers to heroin addiction, for example, or intergenerational cycles of teen pregnancy—then ties itself into knots in order to make those factors a matter of personal responsibility, sapping their political and narrative potency. Bev failed to renew her insurance, so it’s really her fault she gets kicked out of the hospital after overdosing. Lindsay never stood up to their mother, so now she’s “stuck” in a hell of oppressive assistant managers and uneven lawns. (They use plastic forks. And only one of them per meal! Imagine!) Those simple folks who say “syrup” funny? Well, maybe they’re poor because they don’t really want to work.

The story about Bev reminds me of when the late James Bennet brought in Vance as his Working Class Whisperer, and had him write about healthcare policy although he plainly knew absolutely nothing about it but did know that some people less affluent than him should have their insurance taken away. But the crucial thing to remember is that it would ultimately their fault!

Hopefully this movie bombs so badly we never have to hear from him ever again.