YMMV / Hillbilly Elegy

• Critical Dissonance: The movie was absolutely panned by critics, but audiences were far more receptive. Rotten Tomatoes scores are starkly divided, with critic reviews sitting around a "certified rotten" 25% and audience reviews hovering somewhere around 83%. To really hammer it home, Glenn Close was nominated for both an Oscar and a Razzie.
• Critic-Proof: Critically eviscerated for award-baiting Narm and problematic politics, the movie was nonetheless #1 on Netflix at the time of its release and earned Glenn Close Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for her performance — though she was also hit with a Golden Raspberry Award nomination, the first time a single leading performance has received both Oscar and Razzie nods since the 1980s.^note James Coco was nominated for Best and Worst Supporting Actor in Only When I Laugh (1981), and Amy Irving for Best and Worst Supporting Actress in Yentl (1983).
• Glurge: A common criticism of the film, as its melodrama, exaggerated redneck stereotypes, and the fact that the messages of union and family is undermined by how the characters seemingly spend the whole runtime arguing (usually at full volume) make it an emotional misfire.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Both the book and the movie were subject to this.
  • The book's initial release leaned headfirst into No Such Thing as Bad Publicity, because despite its popularity, it was met with extreme backlash from the region it was meant to represent. Almost immediately, academics from Appalachia began to speak out, with the first book rebutting Hillbilly Elegy, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte, a native of East Tennessee, being published in 2017. J.D. Vance's status as "the voice of Appalachia" received particular ire, and an entire book dedicated to breaking down the generalizations he made about poverty was released in 2019 that almost doubles the length of his memoir. It doesn't help that Hillbilly Elegy was released around the time of one of the most controversial elections in recent history and has earned accusations of victim-blaming the culture it supposedly attempted to portray with nuance.
  • While the contention never really died before the release of the movie, audience reviews seem to miss the point of the original controversy, claiming that many critics only hated the movie because it attempted to portray Flyover Country Trump voters in a sympathetic light. See Critical Dissonance above.
• Signature Scene: Most reviews of the film brought up the scene where J.D. panics over the arrangement of silverware at a formal dinner (albeit typically describing it as Narm).
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: In response to the film's overwhelmingly negative critical reception, Amy Adams claimed that the movie was meant to service Ron Howard's vision instead of the politics of the story despite the novel's original, clearly political intentions.

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