In this film, Amy Adams plays a hysterical mother Bev. According to rumors, she hopes to hit Oscar with this role. But the director gave her little space. This is a woman who is crazy from start to finish, taking drugs intermittently, and always messing up her life. The last second was a motherly face, and the next second she suddenly became nervous and beat her son. Why does she have this character? The film does not explain much. The only trace of her early experience is through her daughter's words: Bev's father drank, went home to violently his wife, and his angry wife set her husband on fire...
Such a few words are not enough to arouse the audience's sympathy for the characters. Limited by his son's narrative perspective, Bev's suffering is not covered much. More space is devoted to how Bev is an incompetent mother, which brings a huge burden to his son JD. In contrast, the grandmother Mawmaw played by Glenn Close is more sympathetic. For JD, the mother provided the gravitational force of the falling, while the grandmother lifted the falling JD with her aging body.
No matter which character it is, it has nothing to do with the larger social background, and the character does not have deep and hierarchical background support. We can’t see how Bev fell, we can’t hear how her soul sinks in the struggle, we can’t see how Mawmaw manages the family under the control of her alcoholic husband, we can’t hear how she views Bev . Everything in Middletown is like a fog, becoming a lingering atmosphere on the head of JD's inspirational story.
Some people say that this is where the film failed. The original biography of the film is famous for its distinctive social orientation. Is it because the film director lacks real-world experience, so he can't construct a detailed real world? Maybe, but in my opinion, this ambiguity gives the film a universality, and it is closer to the perspective of personal observation of the world-we are not omniscient, and sometimes even confused. People from different countries can associate their own experiences and observations from this bottom story. Unlike the original, this is not just an American story.
What is the bottom layer? American intellectuals can't wait to find the answer in JD's book. Some people want to justify the poor and describe poverty as structured oppression. Some people wish to blame the poor themselves and describe poverty as self-abandonment and self-depravity.
I came from the bottom, how should I interpret my ancestors, neighbors, and the small village where I was born? That state-owned farm had a brief period of prosperity during the planned economy era. In a small place, there are five large factories, the most advanced Dongfanghong tractors at the time, a clean and bright milk powder building, and a garment factory that rumbling all day long. The era of the market has come, but it has fallen completely. Nowadays, everyone there has a numb and distressed look. This is my Middletown, a small place with the same fate as the big and small towns in the American Rust Belt. My relatives and neighbors are the hillbilly I know.
Many people have fallen into a life similar to Bev-taking drugs. Drugs, religion, and witchcraft have expanded dramatically in recent years. Depravity, violence, and death have also become themes. How did all of this come into being? I can probably outline a social background to explain the bottom ecology, but for me, these are not the most important. There are a lot of troubles in daily life, and it seems that they cannot be completely attributed to social factors. Sometimes, you will see the collapsed and helpless people, think about it, who is to blame? Blame society, blame yourself? After thinking about it, no one is blamed, everyone has a reason, and no one is wrong. But a cloud of fog, really pressed everyone's heart. This fog is a deeper, heavier, and more tangible image than the social analysis of intellectuals, which makes every little thing in the bottom life cast an unpleasant sense of dampness.
Fuzziness points to reality instead. There are symptomatic prescriptions for the transformation of social background, more schools, more job opportunities, but the fog, that gray tone, inexplicably depressed, every bearing in Middletown's operation is due to Humidity and rust caused everything here to be wrong. JD left, jumped out of the bottom and became a new generation of elites, but the new environment reminded him everywhere that he is still hillbilly, a hillbilly who cannot communicate with hillbilly.
JD doesn't have much common language with his mother and grandmother. They don't understand why JD likes to watch political shows so much. They don't want to know what is happening in Washington, New York and San Francisco. In the same way, JD doesn't understand them either. They are confused and unsolvable images, moody, violent and headstrong. The audience’s perspective is exactly the JD’s perspective, and the audience’s confusion is also the JD’s confusion. These confusions are also the confusion of everyone who has risen from the bottom to the elite. The fog follows everywhere like a shadow. I have similar feelings. The elders rarely talk about their past. Moreover, even they themselves are not very clear about how everything is related to the past, and how the grand narrative in society makes a small place shaken by storms. , The truth of the relationship between the characters has become insoluble forever because of their respective paranoia.
JD's original works have a lot of accusations against the bottom people. He does not conceal his criticism of them. Those people are lazy, stupid, and indulgent, and his own success is obviously inseparable from his self-discipline, excellence, and cleverness. If I say, there is still a little luck. The story of the bottom counterattack requires more luck. If his grandmother did not save him from his mother, if his sister was not so sensible, there might be other if, for example, he did not meet a good teacher, for example, he did not have a California uncle to be his role model, he might be like those little ones. Like a gangster, it has since fallen. But no matter where he goes, there will always be a fog in his heart that cannot be sorted out.
This film reminds me of Carver. His editors cruelly cut out his vines of nonsense, but instead made his work more attractive. The characters in Carver's novels are often inexplicable, but people with low-level experience feel that the description is so real. Regardless of the director's intention, Ron Howard's cuts from the original works of J, D, and Vance add to the charm of the film in my eyes. Let us give up those stupid pig-like analyses, don't be silly, don't even need to understand, just feel, feel, feel fragmented in the movie.
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