There's a scene in Ron Howard's new Hillbilly Elegy that approaches the quiet dignity I wish the rest of the movie had. Glenn Close stands in a doorway. She's playing Mamaw, the proud Appalachian grandmother of the high schooler who will eventually write the memoir on which the film is based. Mamaw accepts a free dinner from Meals on Wheels. And while it pains her to do so, she asks for more food. The delivery kid blinks, embarrassed. But he bends the rules a little and the two connect over a small but meaningful act of charity.
Depicting the complex realities of poverty — not just its hollowed-out emptiness but attendant emotions of shame and despair — has always been tricky. That's doubly true for those employed by Hollywood.
But with millions more Americans closer to poverty than there were a year ago and the food lines snaking to the horizon, maybe we should get better at addressing it. Even if theatrical distribution magically rebounds in a post-vaccinated world, money will remain on audiences' minds, no matter how much escapism and popcorn we'd like to chomp on.
To its lasting credit, Hollywood produced a mythical moment of compassion during the worst days of the Great Depression: a climactic close-up that even decades later remains nuanced and open-ended. Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (1931) is a comedy vibrating with economic anxiety. While its iconic hero's resourcefulness is never seriously in doubt, the Little Tramp looks pretty rough by film's end — penniless, on the streets, clothes in tatters after a stretch in jail. In the final shot, though, he is seen for what he is by the one he loves; his eyes shine, knowing there can be no more hiding his true identity. Does she love him back? (By extension, do we?) The fade to black on Chaplin's quivering face is both hopeful and a touch uncertain.
Critic James Agee called it the "highest moment in movies". But the studios, by and large, didn't follow Chaplin's lead. Ultimately, it took the schism of independent cinema, decades later, to open the door to unflinching examinations of poverty that weren't merely sentimental, reductive or convenient plot devices to be solved in the nick of time. Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008) plunges us into the brutal quandaries that come with limited means: Do I buy dog food or steal it? Do I get my broken-down car serviced or make do without? Every choice knocks back Wendy, an Alaska-bound loner played by Michelle Williams, a bit, as do the rare instances in which she encounters sympathy, an emotion that seems to confuse her.
