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Haley Bennett, Gabriel Basso and Amy Adams in Hillbilly Elegy. (Photo: Lacey Terrell/Netflix) |
It’s hard to believe that Ron Howard, the skillful technician and entertainer who directed
Frost/Nixon and
Rush and
In the Heart of the Sea, could also have turned out the new
Hillbilly Elegy. But in a sense he didn’t. It was made by that
other Ron Howard, the one who gave us
A Beautiful Mind, which turned Sylvia Nasar’s brilliant biography of the mathematician John Nash into a fairy tale and was about as profound an exploration of mental illness as
The Snake Pit, and
Cinderella Man, which turned an exciting boxing narrative into an emotionally manipulative David-and-Goliath story pumped out of a Depression-era tearjerker, and
Apollo 13, which felt like a promo for the NASA space program. All seven of these movies are based on real-life stories, so why are some of them so convincing and the others so hopelessly phony?