Hillbilly Elegy: Rotten Tomatoes Stokes Another Anti-Critic Fire
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Since Netflix debuted it’s Oscar-hopeful Hillbilly Elegy, the internet has been in an uproar over this:
Whenever there’s a large discrepancy between the critic and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes, media talking heads run with it, stoking the flames of the on-going debate on if film and television critics know what they’re talking about, or if they’re even necessary. A large portion of interviews to promote the film has become Howard and stars, Glenn Close and Amy Adams, find them dancing around declaring an opinion on whether or not the reviews are politically driven and if that’s okay. The problem with this question is that it implies you can watch a film without politics and you can’t.
Full disclosure, I lived in Chillicothe, Ohio from the age of 3 to 14. We moved to the east coast after it was announced the plant my dad was working at would be shut down. It was one of several companies in Southern Ohio to shut down or downsize in the early ’00s. I haven’t lived there in almost 20 years but it is still the longest I have ever lived in one place and I still keep in touch with people there.
Chillicothe sits about an hour south of Columbus and is technically right on the edge of Appalachia. While I have connections to the area and a great deal of childhood nostalgia, I don’t consider myself Appalachian and would never declare myself a spokesperson for Appalachia or Southern Ohio.
You should also know that I read the book this film is based on… and I really, really did not like it.
The book is written with J.D. Vance speaking as though he is an expert on Appalachians, but Middletown, Ohio is about two hours west of Chillicothe. When it says “hillbilly”, he’s referring to his grandma’s family in eastern Kentucky, but very little of the story takes place there and not everyone in Middletown is from there. On top of this, he uses statistics for why these people struggle but refuses to acknowledge the system in place to keep poor people poor or an education system that trained generations for specific jobs but not to adapt as technology did.
To say I am biased is an understatement, but I’m not alone.
The ability to watch a film without any bias or outside influence is a privilege. After everything that has happened in the last four years, can you honestly say that it’s not influencing your own frame of criticism? If you’re from this area, can you tell me that seeing some version of you and your neighbors on-screen that feels respected (and not as a variation on the mountain men from Deliverance), wouldn’t make you feel excited and overlook if a story is not as strong as it could be?
Ultimately, I enjoyed Hillbilly Elegy and think there are a lot of great things about it. It’s a good movie, in my opinion. Not a horrible or amazing one as the Rotten Tomatoes score would lead you to believe. Having worked in film and television criticism for many years, I can see the complaints and some of them are valid, but many are dismissive of a world they don’t understand.
On the flip side, some critics try to leave out all the larger discussions or can’t empathize with them. This came up a lot with reviewers who didn’t understand why people would enjoy Moonlight (whose pacing and story structure pushed the traditional mold) or why people didn’t like Green Book (which tried to tell a complex story with a more traditional and warm glow). With those films, the issue of racial diversity in film criticism was publically discussed and more outlets realized the need for diversity in their hiring. We need this to continue.
It does matter that you have an LGBTQIA writer looking at films about those stories. It does matter that you find reviewers for Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians that look like those casts. This is why you need reviewers who know what it’s like to live and work in the MidWest to speak to whether those depictions are accurate or exploiting.
You should also have reviewers who don’t match what’s on-screen, so we can keep discussions alive and continue to recognize our own privilege. This can only make how we talk about movies, television, and even bigger societal issues stronger.
The rhetoric from people who embrace a film critics hate, as if it’s a badge of honor, is often “they just don’t get us.”
Those people aren’t wrong, but that’s because critics have a set rubric they use, and that will include the larger societal discussions of the time if the film is based on a book that advertised itself as speaking for Trump voters. Hillbilly Elegy, both the book and the film, does not speak for Trump voters. Yet, the movie can’t escape its source material on that front.
The loudest arguments in this critic vs. fan arena happen in the biggest movies of the year. Marvel. DC. Star Wars.
Suicide Squad was largely reviewed negatively by critics, but the Rotten Tomatoes score shot up in support. This happens a lot when a film is initially released, but the longer it sits on the website the more the audience score levels out. Suicide Squad currently sits at a 59% audience score, which is considered “rotten” by the site.
That’s the other part of the faux-battle between audience and critics. Rotten Tomatoes gives a false impression of decisive scores.
The cut off for a “fresh” review is 60% anything below that is considered “rotten”. At the same time, that percentage isn’t a grade of the quality of the film, it’s the percentage of people that liked or didn’t like it. Hillbilly Elegy didn’t get a grade of 26%. 26% of reviewers didn’t like the film more than they did like it.
The actual “score” of the film is 4.6 out of 10, which means it is an average movie. And that score is determined by a variety of scales because not all reviewers use 4 stars. Some use 5. Some grade it on a scale of 10. Some don’t put a score on there, meaning that Rotten Tomatoes has someone read the review and assign it a score, and I have seen first hand an argument between a PR rep and an LA Times reviewer over whether a middling score was accurately represented as “rotten” on the site (the PR exec won and the label on the review was changed to “fresh”).
But all news is seemingly good news for Hillbilly Elegy. The more arguments, the more people are curious to check out the film.
As for Rotten Tomatoes, they continue to alter their system in the hopes that they can be a more accurate source for how people view a film. I just don’t know how you move past the fights until we stop looking at movies as either “rotten” and “fresh”, and acknowledge the fact that the vast majority of films sit in the middle.
