《乡下人的悲歌》影评100字

　　《乡下人的悲歌》是一部由朗·霍华德执导，艾米·亚当斯 / 格伦·克洛斯 / 加布里埃尔·巴索主演的一部剧情类型的电影，特精心从网络上整理的一些观众的影评，希望对大家能有帮助。

　　《乡下人的悲歌》精选点评：

　　●老中青三位女演员都不错，电影化不易，导演拖了后腿。一般。

　　●期待已经被打压至最低，却迎来“意外惊喜”。对啊，白左影评人怎么可能喜欢这类电影！主线是原生家庭的影响难以实现阶级跨越，而全片重点都是亲人之间爱恨交织的缠斗，营造出一种深入肌理，传于代际的无力感，这种窒息的感觉甚至扑面而来，但爱和暴力又同时共存着，为最后男主的“逃离”创造了很好的落点(我在这里拯救不了谁)。很大的不足在于，剥离了社会空间，让AA、格伦她们的角色太单薄了，得不到观众的同情，无疑削弱了影片整体表达。不过，我A的形象和表演都好颠覆啊！冲奥失败，下次再来，敬请期待！(倘若提名成功，皆大欢喜！)

　　●烂番茄29%、MTC红区显然过于苛刻了。原著的大背景和政治意涵被完全“净化”到只剩JD Vance本人的成长经历，于是这样一个本来可以被深挖的题材就被从小在好莱坞长大的Ron Howard拍成了又一个好莱坞式的hillbilly青年的奋斗而全然不见elegy。如果这个题材换成真正有着Middle America经历的导演/编剧， 比如Jeff Nichols、David Lowery、甚至是马力克，也许会成为一部关于普通美国人的经典之作

　　●没有那么糟糕 不至于低成烂番茄和MTC那样 剧情剪辑很有问题 非常生硬碎片化 靠几个俗套感人情节不足以让人为之动情 剧本也写的不够好 可惜了这部双女主电影 表演没问题 只是整个电影就很平庸 再强大的表演也无法挽救

　　●AA单挑周韵角逐谁是最强疯妈，跳跃剪辑是信条给的灵感还是原著给的勇气

　　●这种程度的传记拍法确实比较失望，对Ron来说也比较不费难度吧。原生家庭的问题当然应该花大力气呈现，但是首先你的时代背景是怎样的？男主角是如何通过自己的努力实现阶级跨越的？他的心态又是如何转变的？妈妈和外婆的生活又是如何导致于此的？这些问题都被大幅度省略了，最后出来的效果就比较平，完全没什么情感力度。包括几条线索交织的也不太好，视点也完全散掉了。到最后，全片值得一说的好像也就只有两大怨妇的飙戏，更何况，演得也就那样而已。

　　●选完了才放出来奈飞是几个意思？Amy Adams努力了那么多年这次应该有小金人了吧？

　　《乡下人的悲歌》影评(一)：这真的不是一个靠个人奋斗实现阶层跃升的美国梦故事

所以那些说电影为啥不表现男主个人努力摆脱家庭影响的，人家根本就没打算拍这个啊。一开始耶鲁实习晚宴上合伙人也是这么认为的，结果不是被男主喷了么？

电影（以及原著）想要表达的是，乡下人虽然有各种各样的问题，但是一家人就是要整整齐齐，相互扶持。男主在原著里说自己能上耶鲁完全是运气，其他人只是不知道有这条路可以走而已。本来原著就不是多么抓马的一本书，改成电影当然要加点戏剧冲突，所以才被误认为是一个美国梦的故事。

主要看点就是Amy Adams和Glenn Close飙戏。尽管我吸毒精神病早当妈但我是个好妈妈/好外婆，红脖子的保守价值代代相传，这样。老话说幸福的家庭大致相似，不幸的家庭各有不同。去工业化导致的贫困不会放过任何肤色的底层，但是美国的政治现实不管左右都在往身份政治方向引，更深层的经济社会政治问题只能是视而不见。

锈带的房屋虽然破破烂烂，但草还是很绿的呀！

　　《乡下人的悲歌》影评(二)：.

妈妈生于60年代，一个还算富裕的家庭

姥爷是军官，姥姥在供销社工作，在经济和社会地位上都算有保障

可自我有记忆起，家里总是无休止的揶揄、争吵、动手

姥姥是十里八村有名的悍妇，拗起来甚至敢大闹政府

姥爷年轻时家里穷，后来当了兵，在那个年代算是逆袭取到姥姥

于是每天就从姥姥的抱怨开始、以恶毒的谩骂结束

骂姥爷喝酒、骂舅舅无能、骂妈妈不孝顺、骂我不听话、骂姐姐打架……

小时候最怕的就是跟姥姥要钱买文具交饭钱

因为每次都会变成无休止的诉苦和咒骂

后来我学会千万不能在她打麻将时要钱

因为她坚信打麻将时给钱会丢运气

可是她一打就是一天啊

后来我再大一点

他们再老一点

姥姥姥爷退休，父母离异，舅舅依然衣来伸手饭来张口、姐姐被迫辍学打工……

情况似乎更糟糕了

姥姥六十多岁了，可脾气却越来越暴躁

我问妈妈，姥姥年轻时就这样吗？

妈妈说，姥姥的童年和青年更加不幸

她有个比她自己还糟糕妈妈，有个更加缺失的爸爸

所以才会理所当然地粗暴对待家人

妈妈年轻时对未来完全没有规划

只有一个想法，那就是逃离，逃离姥姥和这个家

于是大学报志愿时胡乱选了另一个城市、一个完全不擅长的专业、随便找了一个男人嫁了

妈妈也会偶尔感叹，当时要是怎么怎么样就好了啊……

不过她总会在最后加上一句

“但是我不后悔，因为我要是那么做了，就没有你了呀”

去年十一接到妈妈的电话催我赶紧回去，姥姥快不行了

病床上的姥姥骨瘦如柴，小得像被抽干了水

可我记忆里她可是个凶狠高大的老巫婆啊

后来，妈妈跟我说

她只能原谅，因为除了原谅又能做什么呢

就像电影里说的那样，“如果你不原谅，你将永远无法摆脱”

我知道，原生家庭的不幸往往会跌宕数代

但好在

我有一个保护我、爱我、为我阻挡不幸的妈妈

如果你有个不幸的家庭

那么愿你也一样

　　《乡下人的悲歌》影评(三)：《乡下人的悲歌》：有点浪费了艾米·亚当斯的演技

#乡下人的悲歌# （Hillbilly Elegy）（B ）这部看的时候就觉得很痛苦，主要是三位主角，两位（母亲和外祖母）情绪不稳定，总爱吵架，另一位则是男主角却塑造得较为乏味，于是观影时大部分时间是在吵架和无聊交替中度过，看完肯定觉得理解为何男主必须离开这个家[允悲] 虽然早先本片被认为会让艾米·亚当斯 （#Amy Adams#） 和格伦·克洛斯（Glenn Close） 在演技上获得认可，但因为她们的角色塑造得比较单一，难以获得观众同情或喜欢。

自2016年特朗普当选美国总统后，曾让美国精英阶层和好莱坞意识到，也许他们并不了解那些特朗普支持者，即部分蓝领阶层美国白人的生活和想法。也因此，2016年出版的《乡下人的悲歌》（Hillbilly Elegy）这部自传曾一度成为了《纽约时报》评选的全美冠军畅销书，试图让人们通过一个美国中南部白人男性及其家庭的挣扎与奋斗，去了解美国底层民众的心声。也许看完这部大家会了解为何俄亥俄州的人大部分投给了特朗普，像片中这样的美国人确实与所谓的精英阶层很难同步。

故事讲述来自南俄亥俄州的杰德·凡斯（盖布瑞尔·贝索饰）是耶鲁大学法学院学生，之前还担任过海军陆战队队员。他眼看就要得到梦寐以求的工作，但他的母亲却因为毒瘾入院，使他不得不返回他拼命想逃离的那个家。

影片在杰德·凡斯的成年经历和童年遭遇之间往返，时刻提醒人们他们的现在与过去之间的关联。如今即将实现梦想的他来自一个俄亥俄州挣扎在贫困线的家庭，从小就常常被母亲毒打。他的母亲喜怒无常，脾气暴躁，常常因为生活的不顺心拿家人出气。虽然他的祖母也同样是个言行鲁莽的人，但还会把家庭放在第一位，也是家中最支持凡斯离开家乡求学的人。可以看得出来，染上毒-瘾又不断闹事的母亲，成为了男主人生道路上最艰难的挑战，他试图改变自己的人生，但却无法摆脱自己的过去。但最终，凡斯意识到，也许正是过往经历的一切塑造了今天的他。

虽然特朗普在最近的大选中落败，但依然在美国获得了近一半选民的支持，而其中占大部分依然是来自美国中南部白人。像本片这样的故事虽然是关于一个白人男性的经历，但试图让人们明白，少数族裔、海外移民之外，也有不少白人的美国梦也没有那么容易实现。但是问题在于本片上映的有点晚了。如果在2016年后马上翻拍也许还算是新鲜的，但目前大家都已经对这类故事比较熟悉，而这次大选再度加深了分裂和矛盾，似乎光是了解到阶级不同和生活中的难处，并不足以改变人们对立的想法及对特朗普本人的认识。

另一方面，就算抛开故事的社会意义，只看这个家庭，因为男主本人塑造得很平淡，演员也不知名，演到他时很难获得观众的注意，只有两位女演员还算有戏可看，但又过于疯癫和粗鲁。特别是艾米·亚当斯的角色会家暴自己的孩子，常常无理吵闹，确实一部分情节可以说是“泼-妇-骂街”的感觉。她真的演得很卖力，但人们看到还是只能一声叹息，庆幸这不是自己的母亲。

我们在生活中也都会遇到母亲发火有时情绪激动的时候，但大部分的母亲都依然是非常爱自己孩子，爱家庭，而且无私的，大部分时候都是那种骂完孩子还得问孩子吃没吃饱的类型。但本片中这样的单一反派母亲角色如果在恐怖片里没问题，但如果想在颁奖季竞争演技奖项，就比较难，需要更多层次，让人有共鸣的角色。就算可恨也得有可怜之处。而这位母亲又有毒-瘾，观众想同情都难。格伦·克洛斯的外祖母尚且有人情味，也许有望再拿个配角提名，毕竟今年片子少。

　　《乡下人的悲歌》影评(四)：NY Magazine：这部就是为了冲奥的电影显示精英可怕的傲慢；AA千万不要因为这种烂戏拿到小金人。

这部电影因其回忆录本身的政治或舆论目的而被讨论。我转载了纽约杂志的两篇文章，第一篇是关于书和电影为何带有右派政治目的，第二篇评论Amy Adams在电影中不太出色的、只为冲奥的、令人乏味的表演，作者以AA多年影迷的视角分析为什么奥斯卡不应该觉得时候对了就因为这部电影给AA一部奥斯卡。

看了一些其他的影评，总体来说此片和此书在评论界非常受争议，而受争议的具体方式一般是受到差评。这其中对J.D. Vance本人的价值观和动机讨论较多。动机争议包括比如，Vance的妻子曾经为保守派因性侵以及对宪法缺少常识的Kavannaugh供职，而出书前后Vance在共和党政界变的受欢迎混的如鱼得水；有评价说他本人的memoir是对rust belt地带的一种扭曲的propaganda；（因此）很多影评批评这部电影的态度居高临下。

转载。

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/who-is-netflixs-hillbilly-elegy-for.html

By Sarah Jones

Five minutes intoHillbilly Elegy, I hit pause and walked out of my living room. In the relative safety of my bedroom, I stared at the wall and then at the ceiling; both suddenly appeared preferable to my television.Hillbilly Elegyis not a subtle film. It tells us early how it intends to go about things. The camera pans out to show broken-down houses and rusted-out trucks in what is supposed to be Eastern Kentucky. There are men without shirts and men with long white beards doing manly things on the side of a country road. This is a holler, according to director Ron Howard, and nothing good could happen next. But I’m not a coward. I returned to the movie. I looked for the “holler aunt,” a creature I learned of not through my own Appalachian upbringing — which was mostly dull — but through thecasting announcementsfor this film. Where was the holler aunt？ What distinguishes her from other varieties of aunt, and how would I recognize her？

Reader, I cannot tell you anything about the holler aunt. Like the mythical Sasquatch, she eludes me. On the subject ofHillbilly Elegyitself, however, I have much more to say — and none of it is positive.

But first I must admit that I did not expect to like this movie, and I have resented Netflix for midwifing it into being. My antipathy for its source material — J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir of the same name — is by now well-established. As Iwroteat the time of its release, the book is poverty porn wrapped in a right-wing message about the cultural pathologies of the region. In Vance’s Appalachia, poverty and immorality intertwine. Success happens to hard-working people, and structural explanations for poverty receive glancing attention when he chooses to mention them at all. Vance, meanwhile, is a hero by virtue of his escape. The deceased do not give elegies for themselves. Survivors do that. And so Vance can speak for the hillbilly because he no longer is one; because he went to Yale, the stereotype of the uncouth white reprobate no longer applies.

His flattened-out view of the hill country appeals to many — obviously — though, in Appalachia itself,Elegyreceived a decidedly unenthusiastic reception. Local activists and scholars alike havewritten booksin response toElegyand its politics. “For Vance,” the historian Elizabeth Catte wrote in her 2017 book,What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, the region’s “only salvation is complete moral re-alignment, coupled with the recognition that we should prioritize the economic investments of our social betters once more within the region.” Vance’s invitation to the 2018 Appalachian Studies Association even sparkeda protest.

But there was always a possibility, however slim, that Ron Howard and Vanessa Taylor (the woman who co-wroteThe Shape of Water), might improve on Vance’s ham-fisted project. Alas. A year after Bong Joon-ho’sParasitetook home the award for Best Picture, Netflix and Howard have taken up the class-war theme and given it theGreen Book treatment.Elegythus belongs to an old and ignoble genre, one which caricatures the hillbilly for an audience’s titillation.

In film, television, and comics, the hillbilly is either a villain or an exotic: congenitally violent, almost subhuman, sometimes even supernatural. Everyone knowsDeliverance, with its twisted backwoods rapists. But there’s also6 Souls, a lamentable 2013 horror movie starring Julianne Moore, in which the hollers hold real witches and their powerful curses reach far beyond the hills. The USA network put its own spin on the genre with itsOutsidersseries, revolving around a hill clan so isolated they still speak a Celtic language and make magical moonshine that turns people violent. InNell, the 1994 film starring Jodie Foster, the lonely North Carolina high country nearly turns a woman feral; her idiosyncratic language is barely recognizable as English. The subjects of hillbilly movies have served a consistent function over time. Whites “who simultaneously occupied a heroic past and a degraded present” were useful to social elites, and the pop-culture portrayal could “both uphold the superiority of modern civilization and provide exhilarating scenes of murder and mayhem that did not threaten the ‘proper’ social and racial order,” wrote Anthony Harkins inHillbilly: An American Icon.

SoElegyisn’t meant for the people of Appalachia, or the Ozarks, or the Rust Belt. No hillbilly film is ever made for the people it depicts. They’re intended for people with power and security, people who want to believe that money is the same thing as integrity or intelligence and that, conversely, an absence of money indicates something about a person’s character. Viewers want to look at the hillbilly and reassure themselves they arenot that. After all, they’d vote for Obama a third time if they could. Located beyond the reach of reason or society, the hillbilly is pure white id. He’s also a fiction. In reality, the trappings of civilization do not purify a soul. You cannot tell a good white person from a bad white person by the way someone dresses — or how they sound when they speak.

A movie about poor people of Appalachian extraction does not have to be a hillbilly film. But Vance’s decision to provide an exhilarating portrait of a dysfunctional culture leavesElegythe movie nowhere interesting to go.Elegyis entirely true to Vance’s book, which is the worst thing I could say about it. Glenn Close plays Mamaw, lurching around in Warby Parker spectacles and oversized T-shirts. She smokes. She yells. She exists mostly to spout profane homespun wisdom and to rescue Vance from his troubled mother. “There’s three kinds of people,” she tells a young Vance. “Good terminator, bad terminator, and neutral.” She speaks portentously of the customs of hill people. When Vance gets into a fight, early in the film, she references a mysterious “code” which regulates hillbilly honor. InElegy’s fun-house mirror Appalachia, the old feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys isn’t just a matter of historical interest.

But the most offensive performance of the film belongs toAmy Adams, who shrieks, squeals, and flails through scene after dreadful scene. As Vance’s mother, who suffers from undiagnosed mental-health issues and an eventual substance abuse problem, Adams is a banshee.Elegyaffords her few opportunities to humanize an extreme character. We learn that she was the salutatorian of her high school, and she seems to love her children nearly as much as she resents them. Her childhood abuse — perpetrated, sometimes, by Vance’s beloved Mamaw — are presented to give her dimension. It doesn’t work. In every other respect, Adams plays a stereotype. She sleeps around. She steals pain pills, then escalates to heroin. She loses jobs and hits her children. That’s just how hillbillies are.

But strip away Amy Adams’s coveralls and bangs, remove Glenn Close’s glasses and foul mouth, and what’s left？ Poverty. And that is a political problem. Here,Hillbilly Elegythe book has one advantage over its film adaptation: Vance admits that he believes substance abuse and financial ruin may be ameliorated by policy, which is key to his right-wing conclusions. The movie sidesteps politics — or at least it tries to. It’s not so easy.

Before liberal Hollywood took an interest in Vance’s tale,Hillbilly Elegyfound its earliest champions on the right. This was not a coincidence. Vance merely recycled old party myths about poverty and the hillbilly. The nation’s hill people suffer from that dysfunctional culture: Give them church, scold them for their broken homes, do something unspecified about the opioid crisis, and watch the hillbilly flourish, just as Vance has flourished.Elegywas never purely memoir, nor was it even marketed as such. Sold as sociology,Elegypromised explanations for cultural tendencies of which many readers were only dimly aware.

In 2016, both liberals and conservatives developed a frantic interest in these tendencies. Donald Trump was president, and while the hillbilly did not deserve all (or even most) of the credit for putting him in the White House, Trump’smargins in rural areasdid help put him over the top. For those curious about the region’s affinity for right-wing views, there was Vance. Elevated by Yale to dramatic heights, Vance spent years working for Peter Thiel, the libertarian venture capitalist whoselinksto the anti-democraticrightpredated his support for Trump. Thiel even blurbedElegy, and helpedbankrollVance’s new venture-capital fund, which willallegedly bringtech jobs to the forgotten hollers of Atlanta and Raleigh. Following the success of his book, Vance became a frequentTucker Carlsonguest and developed an ally in conservative blogger Rod Dreher, who claimed in 2016 thatElegy“does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor Black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.” He and Vance remainpersonal friendsto this day.

This matters, because Dreher isn’t exactly a Lincoln Project Republican. Like Thiel, Dreher belongs to a further fringe of the right wing. His views deserve some dissection, if only to illustrate how troubling it is that Vance will not disavow him, and that Howard has erased any trace of the politics that drew Dreher to Vance’s work. In his regular column forThe American Conservative, Dreher has repeatedlyrecommended The Camp of the Saints, the openly racist book championed by Steve Bannon. Dreher haspraisedand even met with Viktor Orban, president of Hungary, dubbing him a champion for Christians. (Orban, if you aren’t familiar, shut Hungary’s borders to migrants in the middle of a humanitarian crisis, arrested critics, and recently assigned himself new, dictatorial emergency powers. Dreher has alsosaidhe is “glad” that Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator, won the Spanish Civil War.)

There’s more to say about Dreher, whose fear of migration is matched only by his contempt for trans people (you need only Google his byline to find the evidence). But,Elegyis Vance’s story — a story that, in Ron Howard’s hands, has been stripped of all the vitriolic conclusions the right wing could use. As a paean to the civilizing power of bootstraps, Vance’s memoir suggests the kinds of solutions that make up small-government manifestos, even though Vance himself has tried to distance himself from that strain of conservative thinking, preferring instead a “pro-worker, pro-family conservatism,” as he put it ina speech. Though it’s not always clear what he means by this. Last year, heappearedwith Thiel, Senator Josh Hawley, and other luminaries at a conference on “national conservatism,” where hecriticizedlibertarianism, then attacked pornography and the government itself for allowing such obscene material to exist. On labor rights, meanwhile, he is relatively silent. He has complained about the “abortion lobby” and has worried — frequently and publicly — about declining American fertility rates. In 2016,during a talk with Charles MurrayofBell Curveinfamy, the two joked about their “pretty clean Scotch-Irish blood” before Vance asserted “there’s definitely a sort of ethnic component to what’s going on” in areas like Appalachia.

ForElegyto make sense as a movie at all, Howard must focus more on Vance’s family dynamics than his ideology. The narrative is also friendliest to Vance: He is the withdrawn, book-smart core of the story, a natural authority because he alone made it out of the maelstrom. Even when Vance and his sister struggle to get their mother into rehab, the political implications of their situation go unexamined. Vance’s mother is the culprit, a recalcitrant good-for-nothing who let her health insurance lapse and can’t muster a little gratitude when her suit-jacketed son tries to put her stay on his credit cards.

But in elevating Vance, however sanitized, Howard also elevates the nativist movement that influences his young hero. Glenn Close and Amy Adams have pinned their Oscar hopes to material penned by a right-wing commentator who keeps company with some of the most anti-democratic figures in the modern conservative movement. And there are signs, sometimes, that the creators ofElegysuspect they have walked into a trap. Netflix’s popular poster for the film features Adams and Close as Bev and Mamaw; Vance is nowhere to be seen. The film’s worst excesses feel like an attempt at misdirection. It overwhelms us with hillbilly cosplay, wearing us down with Mamaw’s colorful one-liners and Bev’s meltdowns so that Vance appears purposefully dull and sensible by comparison. He’s not a guy anyone wants to Google. There’s an epilogue, which mentions his Yale degree and his memoir, though not his links to the admirers of fascists. Roll credits.

Had Howard or anyone at Netflix paid attention to the region Vance says he represents, they might have spared us this travesty. But there were Oscars to win, holler aunts to cast. In the long and often bloody history of Appalachia, there is precedent for what both Howard and Vance have done. Capitalism extracts. It takes timber from the forests, coal from the mountains, and labor from the people. The hillbilly is just another resource to exploit.

https://www.vulture.com/2020/11/why-amy-adams-shouldnt-win-an-oscar-for-hillbilly-elegy.html#_ga=2.104527808.1551692994.1605527257-1849172309.1605527257

When I was 12 years old, I remember killing time in my grandmother’s basement watching a DVD for the only R-rated movie I could find, Junebug.I’ll never forget witnessing the hilarious and effervescent performance by that one redheaded actress from Catch Me If You Can. And I was delighted when her star continued to rise thereafter, racking up six Oscar nominations — and, tragically, no wins. There were her performances in Enchanted and The Fighter and Doubt and The Master. Fifteen years later, I still find myself periodically revisiting Junebug to watch Amy Adams’s devastating climactic scene and to remind myself what good acting looks like. Sure, there are some missteps in her career (we’re just gonna breeze past Big Eyes and all things Julie from Julie & Julia), but, by and large, I learned that you could depend on Adams to deliver a compelling performance, one grounded in reality and emotional vulnerability, no matter the material or genre.

That’s why under no circumstances whatsoever, for the love of all that is good on God’s green earth, can my favorite zero-time Academy Award–winning actress Amy Adams secure an Oscar for her performance as Bev Vance in Hillbilly Elegy.

“But, Chris,” you say, “surely if you think Amy Adams is such a fine actress, you’d want her to be recognized and celebrated by a jury of her peers？” And you’d be right. Of course I want Amy Adams to win the highest honor that the film industry has to offer and join the ranks of her redheaded sisters Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Julia Roberts. But absolutely not like this. Adams winning an Oscar for her work in Hillbilly Elegy would be worse than her never wining an Oscar at all. And for those who’ve already seen the film ahead of its Netflix premiere on November 24, this is not a controversial opinion.

Hillbilly Elegy is currently sitting pretty on Rotten Tomatoes with a galling 29 percent fresh rating, and even this score feels a little high, given that the movie’s storytelling proceeds with the precision of a sledge hammer. But my particular beef isn’t with the (many) mistakes director Ron Howard made while adapting J.D. Vance’s autobiography about going from the Rust Belt to Yale Law School and back again. This is about Amy Adams’s performance as the protagonist’s well-intentioned but drug-addicted mother, Bev Vance.

Adams truly does the absolute most with the role given to her, wildly careening between portraying a struggling parent just doing her best to raise two kids on her own to depicting the horrors of an abusive mother, daughter, and partner at a mere moment’s notice. It’s an exhausting performance that clumsily hammers away at all the traumatic notes you’d expect from someone trying to win an Oscar, down to the intentionally unglamorous wig and makeup. But it’s not the sheer amount of capital-A Acting that Adams doles out in Hillbilly Elegy that’s the problem. Rather, it’s the lack of something, anything, that you’d associate with the prototypical Amy Adams performance. Any actress could deliver Bev’s exaggerated lines and gestures as they were likely written in the ｓｃｒｉｐｔ, which is perhaps why Adams’s choices — every scream uttered, insult hurled, unsteady hand outstretched — feel rote and uninspired. You could see them coming from a mile away.

One particularly egregious moment occurs about an hour into the film, when Bev refuses to enter a treatment center for her heroin addiction after J.D. goes to great lengths to get her admitted. In a heated argument, J.D., played by Gabriel Basso, yells at his mother for leaching off their grandmother, Glenn Close’s Maw-Maw, who served as J.D.’s primary caregiver for a time and with whom Bev has an extremely fraught relationship. “Yeah. Like she was a goddamn saint？” Adams spits back, adding a sarcastic shrug, as if to shout, Um, no she wasn’t, dipshit. It’s an unnecessary exclamation point tacked on to the end of an emotional beat that’s been written out in all caps and underlined with red ink. Do Maw-Maw and Bev maintain a complicated and tenuous bond, influenced by generational trauma and the conditions of their shared experience with poverty？ Um, no shit, Sherlock!

If you look back at some of Amy Adams’s best work, it’s the lack of exclamation points that leaves the biggest impression. Think back to her turn as tough Southie track star Charlene in The Fighter, and the effortless, understated grit she brought to the role. Or the linguist Dr. Louise Banks in Arrival, quietly grieving and searching for connection. Or even her most recent Emmy-nominated run as a self-harming journalist in the miniseries Sharp Objects, battling demons within and without. Adams was grounded, subtle, surprising. Her banal and cliché performance as Bev Vance in Hillbilly Elegy is the antithesis of her best work.

In such a fraught year for movies, I can see how an Academy member might think that this is the perfect time to give a trophy to Adams. It’s a “weird year” and she’s “worked so hard for it,” they’ll say at their (virtual) luncheons at the Beverly Wilshire behind closed doors in various light-filled Los Angeles kitchens projected in a blinding grid on Zoom. To any AMPAS cardholders reading this, I beseech thee: Don’t vote for Amy Adams. This is not her Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant moment. This is not her Julianne Moore in Still Alice moment. This is not her Charlize Theron transforms into Aileen Wuornos for Monster moment. Let’s not tarnish this woman’s legacy by giving her a statue for one of her worst performances, like we did with Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady. It is not her turn. It is not her time.

And to the Adams-hive, our day will come! Our girl will pull through and win a statue for acting in something that’s worthy of her many talents, that highlights what she does best: astound us with the depth of her humanity. But this year, let’s not leave it to “Beaver” — the pet name Adams gave her Bev Vance wig; if I have to know it, you do, too — let’s leave it to someone else. Anyone else. Hey, if the Academy wants to give it to Glenn, by all means go ahead. I don’t have a dog in that fight.