Last November, Netflix released Hillbilly Elegy. Based on the book of corporate goon/congressional candidate JD Vance, the film claims to be a look at the lives of the down-and-out in rural Ohio and Kentucky. It was pretty roundly lambasted as an obvious fraud. Hollywood talent in front of and behind the camera, and a book meant to bolster the political career of an ambitious charlatan. Really, the only thing the film did successfully was blow up the spot of Holler, the vastly superior film about the same topic.
When you live in a small rust belt town, it can be hard to see a future for yourself. Decades of neoliberal economic policy have shattered much of rural America. There is no real social safety net. Vance, fittingly for someone running for Republican office in a DEEP red state, blames the people for their problems. Hillbilly Elegy reflects that. It’s a story utterly lacking in empathy.
Holler takes a more humanistic view of the problem. Writer/director Nicole Riegel has lived this life. She sees the humanity inherent to the little moments of collapse.
“Ruth, we believe you can be anyone you want.”
Ruth (Jessica Barden) is a smart girl in a tough spot. Growing up in rural Ohio, she’s watched jobs vanish and opioids run rampant. She’s learned a sort of reflexive hostility, a recognition that the system was not built to help people like her. She’s not wrong about that. Her mother, a recovering addict (Pamela Adlon), wants to come home when she gets out of jail rather than go to a much-needed rehab facility. Her father is never mentioned.
The only stable adults in her life are surrogate-mom Linda (Becky Ann Baker) and her older brother Blaze (a deeply miscast Gus Halper), who sees how smart she is but lacks the maturity to really care for her. She misses class regularly, antagonizing her teachers, helping Blaze collect scrap metal to sell to a local junkyard. That doesn’t bring in enough money to survive, let alone to pay for college. But how else does someone escape a town like Jackson?
Eventually, Ruth and Blaze join the scrapyard as employees, rather than sellers, under the oversight of owner Hark (Austin Amelio). It gives them the chance to make real money, but the work is dangerous. Hark takes Ruth under his wing and gives her and Blaze a chance to do more than scrape by. There’s a real living to be made in the scrapyard, one with at least a little security. And on the flipside, the student debt Ruth would have to take on at college could be life-destroying.
What does she do? How do you make a choice like that? Dangerous, precarious work — or financially barter away your future for the off-chance of escape? And what else do you leave behind when you try to get away?
“Well, I don’t want to be in this room anymore.”
Holler is a film about America, but it’s also a film about a very specific part of America. First-time writer/director Nicole Riegel comes by the story honestly: She grew up in a town like this, in a situation like this. She knows what it’s like to watch a town sink into despair.
Unfortunately, her newness gets the best of her at times, making her overplay her hand to go for the too-broad metaphor. When a character mentions his town being left behind while the camera watches Ruth play with a globe, the message is distressingly blunt. The movie is at its worst when the characters feel like pawns in a grand Statement. Is Riegel telling their story, or just using that story to score points?
Thankfully, it’s not a problem that pops up too often. It can see the way — show the way — global neoliberalism has devastated communities without needing to resort to heavy-handed metaphors. And it can recognize that there is no solution, no real escape. The pain, the trauma, lingers. The human toll of global capitalism is inescapable, its gravity relentless.
No character better encapsulated this idea than Becky Ann Baker’s Linda. Becky Ann Baker has quietly been one of the best character actors of my lifetime. Baker is game for anything, capable of comedy and drama, and always gives everything to the performance. Here, she plays the last anchor of a faltering community, a labor organizer at the last factory in town. She struggles to make sure that the workers are taken care of and treated like people despite having no power. Baker disappears for large chunks of the movie, but many of the film’s best scenes belong to her.
“So can I be that?”
Holler lives in the same universe as Winter’s Bone. But Holler lacks the genre hook that made Winter’s Bone easier to digest. Yeah, it told a story about life on the margins, but it was tied to a crime drama. It’s easier to deal with this kind of story when it’s built on expected genre hooks. There’s an almost documentary-like quality to Holler from time-to-time, something more like Rich Hill.
Riegel is a relatively new voice, but this is the sort of self-assured character piece that would have been the toast of Sundance in the 90s. Today, Holler is likely destined to be buried in a streaming service, grist for the content mill. But hopefully that will make it easier to stumble upon, easier for people to find and appreciate. I’ve lived in cities like this before, and there was something surprisingly moving about seeing it reflected on screen without condescension. I hope more people can have that experience.