Raptors and rednecks

Ticket Stubs is a movie column reviewing new and not-so-new releases, Hollywood classics, nostalgic trash, and more obscure cinematic fare. This is Ticket Stubs #19.

The recent deaths of Sam Neill and Brenda Fricker sent me back to Jurassic Park and My Left Foot, while the publication of J.D. Vance’s latest book, Communion, prompted me to take a look at the movie adaptation of his first offering, Hillbilly Elegy.

Wow! Look at that teeny little helicopter and that massive island! Oh my God, that brachiosaurus! It’s gigantic — and it looks so real! Behind you! Don’t go in there! Whatever you do, don’t make a sound!

These were, as best as I can remember, my seven-year-old reactions to Jurassic Park when it was released in 1993; fittingly, because these were also my responses during my inaugural viewing of Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), and while Jurassic Park cannot stake an equal claim to landmark pop-art, it is nonetheless one of the most exciting family adventure pictures of the 1990s, and a reminder that Steven Spielberg’s directorial vision is as boundless as his childlike imagination. I can’t tell you with any authority what cinema is but I can tell you that this is what it’s supposed to do.

Megabucks weirdo John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) is head honcho at InGen, a very Nineties tech firm in that it starts out idealistic and inevitably becomes evil. In addition to bringing back long-extinct dinosaurs, via A Science Thing, Hammond has invented driverless electric cars with a dashboard screen. I just hope Elon Musk is getting residuals. Hammond has a slight problem: turns out resurrecting ancient alligators the size of skyscrapers and sticking them on an island with people is a really bad idea. When a velociraptor mauls an employee, investors threaten to bail unless Jurassic Park gets the okay from experts, so Hammond flies in palaeontologist Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), palaeobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), and they set about studying Isla Nublar and its remarkable inhabitants.

There’s no movie if the nerd squad finds everything at the park tickety-boo — imagine if Jaws had left Amity alone to enjoy July 4 — and so of course the dinos break free and hunt the humans through the prehistoric safari. Like most of Spielberg’s best movies, Jurassic Park is a genre-bender that cuts effortlessly from adventure to action to comedy to thriller. It is particularly strong on that last point: tension-soaked sequences of our principals stalked by relentless reptilians would not be out of place in a slasher movie. The credit for this goes to director of photography Dean Cundey who cut his teeth on Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) and has a gift for photographing menace looming just beyond the frame, awaiting its moment to pounce. This is on display most famously in the tense kitchen stalking sequences, but can also be noted in small but highly effective moments throughout the movie. Who but Cundey could make close-ups of trembling water glasses stomach-knottingly ominous?

The screenplay is more knowing than it might seem. When Dr. Malcolm upbraids Hammond for crass commercialisation — ‘Before you even knew what you had, you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox and now you’re selling it’ — it’s impossible to miss the dig at Universal’s hyper-aggressive marketing of the picture and seemingly insatiable appetite for merchandising tie-ins, which did in fact include branded lunchboxes. For several years after the movie’s release Jurassic Park toys were everywhere; I had the jeep and the action figures, though all have long since gone to the giant landfill in the sky. (Please don’t get in touch to tell me how much they’d be worth today. The separation is painful enough.)

This is an ensemble picture but Sam Neill is at the heart of it, an avatar through which the (adult) spectator can enter into the movie, gasping in wonder here, issuing sceptical admonitions there. Neill’s Dr. Grant is in the Indiana Jones tradition of smart and funny action heroes who get their business done by wisdom and guile rather than roided-up muscles and military-grade hardware. One of the most lasting contributions of Spielberg’s filmography to popular culture is the glamorisation of the geek. Neill’s character gets some predictable but endearing growth, going from pleasantly cranky scientist cynic who can’t stand sprogs to father figure who risks his life to save Hammond’s two grandchildren. Because, yes, this piece of work actually brought his grandkids to Killer Dinosaur Island after one of his employees was torn to shreds. Revisited as an adult, Hammond’s character takes on more sinister tones as the worst kind of baddie: the kind who sees himself, and is seen by others, as benign and well-meaning. Jurassic Park needs one of those trailer re-edits to recast the movie as a psychological thriller about a deadly dreamer who has lost touch with reality. David Attenborough’s performance is unusually leaden, perhaps because he approaches such a morally dubious role too broadly, and gently, and without judgement. It’s like if he had played John Christie as a rogue landlord who kept accidentally gassing his tenants.

There is an enjoyable streak of black humour running through the movie, some of which I savoured in 1993 (an unhappy cow being lowered into a dinosaur enclosure as lunch; ‘God help us, we’re in the hands of engineers’) and some of which I only caught during this viewing (one character has a photograph of J. Robert Oppenheimer taped to his computer monitor). An early appearance by Samuel L. Jackson as a chain-smoking computer engineer who furiously rattles his keyboard and mutters about mainframes and overrides and the like — a staple of 1990s movies — is a welcome addition, though it is now jarring to see a non-villain smoking in a family picture.

Based on a novel by Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park was one of the most profitable films of its decade, drew enthusiastic copy from critics, and was almost unavoidable at the time, to an extent only rivalled by Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) a few years later. The movie unleashed an ever-expanding franchise of big-screen sequels, television series, video games, and the aforementioned merchandise market, but the original film is the only one that truly needs to be seen.

The novelist and painter Christy Brown was unlike any other in that he could type and paint only with his left foot.

Born to a poor family in the south of Dublin in 1932, he was diagnosed with severe cerebral palsy that inhibited most of his movement and speech. Everyone except his mother, Bridget, wrote him off as simple and advised that he be institutionalised, but a mother’s love being what it is Bridget refused to send her son away.

Enter celebrated paediatrician Robert Collis, an early Irish specialist in cerebral palsy, and Christy began to receive speech and motor function therapy. While he never gained use of his other limbs he was able to make a name for himself as an artist and a writer.

First-time director Jim Sheridan, who also directed Daniel Day-Lewis in 1993’s In the Name of the Father and 1997’s The Boxer, has never surpassed his debut but what a debut. My Left Foot, which stars Day-Lewis as Christy and Brenda Fricker as Bridget, contains not one ounce of melodrama. Christy is a figure of awe, occasionally anger, and sometimes even fear, but never pity. My Left Foot was one of the first movies about disability where the disabled was allowed to be a dick.

This is on display in one of cinema’s most awkward restaurant scenes when Christy learns that Eileen (Fiona Shaw), a speech therapist oblivious to his love for her, is to be married to Peter (Adrian Dunbar). A heartbroken and bilious Christy forces out a stuttered ‘Con-grat-u-la-tions’, before adding: ‘I’m glad you taught me how to speak so I could say that, Eileen.’ Christy becomes steadily more obnoxious before suddenly thumping his head off the table over and over. It is an act of such violence that you are momentarily grateful for his disability. There’s no telling how an able-bodied Christy might have reacted to Eileen’s ‘betrayal’.

Yet Christy can also be terrifically witty about his limitations. In one achingly comic moment, he growls: ‘I’ve had nothing but Platonic love all my life. Do you know what I say? Fuck Plato.’ In another, when Eileen and Peter are showing him off for some friends, Christy lets them know what he thinks of being a sacrifice to their liberal consciences: as Eileen prepares a glass of wine for him, placing a serviette over her wrist with unthinking ritualism, he quips, ‘Introibo ad altare Dei’, and when Peter explains to a friend that the words are from the Latin Mass, Christy interjects: ‘I thought it was James Joyce.’

Much of the credit for the movie must go to Day-Lewis, who plays a man and never a disability, and Fricker more than earns her Best Supporting Actress Academy Award with a gruelling performance as the tender-tough-devout-determined Irish everymammy. Those who know her only as the pigeon lady from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (Chris Columbus, 1992) should acquaint themselves with this film and her deft, authentic performance.

Having equipped himself with two of the finest actors to come out of Britain and Ireland, Jim Sheridan trusts them to carry the movie on the strength of their interpretation of Christy and Bridget and he forgoes much in the way of authorial style and signature, choices that wouldn’t have been easy for a first-time director to make but which elevate the film. Directors sometimes direct best when they direct lightly.

Hollywood might one day forgive Ron Howard for making a sympathetic biopic of J.D. Vance, but will he ever forgive himself?

Whenever he talks about Hillbilly Elegy, a fluent but poorly received 2020 adaptation of the 2016 memoir of the same name, his tone borders on the penitent. When Howard was directing his movie, Vance was still The Acceptable Face of The Republican Party, which is to say he was a conservative critic of Donald Trump; Howard wasn’t to know that a few years later Vance would become one of Trump’s fieriest cheerleaders and eventually his Vice President. Not too long ago, Vulture asked him about working with Vance and his answer was a list of mitigating factors:

‘It remains a bit of a surprise to me. I would not have seen it coming, and I wouldn’t have expected his rhetoric to be as divisive as it sometimes is. By the way, I’m not following him or listening to every word.’

Someone offer the guy a plea deal. Hillbilly Elegy isn’t all that bad. It’s a competently made, occasionally lyrical, and quietly moving piece about the tension between loyalty to home and heritage and ambition for something better. We’ve all felt that dilemma and while many of us are too scared, or lazy, or sentimental to make the break, the ones who do are the only ones who make anything of themselves. Vance has certainly made something of himself, and whether his influence on US politics is deemed benign or baleful, the world is a more interesting place for his having got out. Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how he did it.

Vance (Owen Asztalos in childhood; Gabriel Basso at Yale; both creditable performances) hails from the foothills of Appalachia and a poor-but-proud raising by an opioid-gulping mother (Amy Adams) and his beloved ‘mamaw’ (Glenn Close), a tough old broad with a dirty laugh who watched her daughter become a fuck-up and is damn sure her grandson isn’t going to follow in her oxycodone-fuelled, roller-bladed footsteps. She takes in the young J.D. and provides him with the stable home life that will eventually propel him to Yale, Capitol Hill, and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Close is unrecognisable thanks to Virginia Johnson’s costume design and Matthew W. Mungle’s prosthetic work, and together they transform one of Hollywood’s most elegant actresses into a redneck Peggy Hill, but her performance is more than powder and latex. Close brings out an abrasively endearing hill woman who has nothing to give her grandson but fierce love, jealous protection and respect for his kith and kin. Adams offers one of her most vulnerable and unvarnished performances as Vance’s permanently strung-out mother who oozes resentment that she missed out on the opportunities available to her son.

Critics hated the picture. Sara Stewart of Book & Film Globe sniffed at its ‘vague message about bootstraps and personal responsibility’, as though Howard should have retconned a federal programme that airlifted J.D. from Middletown to the Munich Security Conference. For Louisa Moore of Screen Zealots, it was ‘like an episode of Jerry Springer’. Joonatan Itkonen of Region Free regarded it as ‘a distasteful and expensive poverty safari’ depicting ‘an Appalachia completely bereft of minorities’. (J.D. Vance’s hometown is so cancelled.) Robin Holabird of KUNR Public Radio lamented ‘a story modeling the exact opposite of any child-rearing handbook’. (Not only didn’t she like the movie, I think this lady might have called social services on it.) Finally, Eye for Film’s Jennie Kermode — I went to university with Jennie; hey, Jennie! — found it ‘recycled, repetitive and dull’.

Lord knows it’s not Ron Howard’s finest work but Hillbilly Elegy is a solid piece of melodrama and, here and there, something more; a gravelly mountain dirge for a people, a place, and a time into which Vance was born, once longed to escape, but now, ensconced in tony New Haven, among his intellectual peers, trading jurisprudential bons mots with Amy Chua, feels drawn to by hiraeth, the homesickness of the soul. It’s difficult to watch Hillbilly Elegy and fathom how anyone could be surprised by Vance’s post-liberal turn, if there even was a turn. Twentieth century liberalism and its cheer squad in popular culture told Americans that self was something to be found out there, on the road, in the city, among strangers, but self is blood and kin and rearing. Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again but the truth is you never really leave.

Vance’s self was formed in a world that, then as now, got nothing but the dust from liberalism’s heels: the mining accidents and lung ailments, layoffs and plant closures, welfare and oxies and military recruiters and Cletus, the Slack-Jawed Yokel. Vance bristles with resentment at a political system and a political philosophy which rarely served his people well. Is there any particular reason he shouldn’t? Must he and his people forgo the identity-based grievances encouraged, rewarded and celebrated in every other demographic? Besides, all this cynicism about the Vance mythos would be easier to take if it wasn’t coming from a journalistic and cultural firmament that spent 2004 onwards gushing over Barack Obama, his dreams from his father, and the audacity of the hope these inspired. Hillbilly Elegy asks the empathy kids to have the feels for America’s least sympathetic group: poor, dysfunctional whites.