Film Review

The Nashville Film Festival Day Four: The Real Beverly Hillbillies

You may remember a few years back that CBS was working on a reality series called The Real Beverly Hillbillies.  The concept was to take a family of "hillbillies" give them a million dollars, and set them up in a mansion in Beverly Hills.  Well, a senator from Georgia got a little upset about that saying that the series was exploiting stereotypes about good country people in order to make money.  That senator got several other senators to sign a letter asking the network to stop production on the series, and they did.

The creator of that series, a man from the Appalachian area of Virginia himself, decided to follow through with a version of the story, told in a documentary film, instead.  The question is was this film made to tell the story the director hoped to tell with the series or was it made to answer the allegations of stereotyping and exploitation leveled against him?  The answer is well, the director attempted to both with his bitterness about the cancelation of his story and the need to answer those allegations covered at the cost of the story he had initially wanted to tell.

Those of you who've read my reviews of documentaries before know that right away I take points off a film if the director needlessly appears in it unless it's a personal documentary.  The whole first twenty minutes of this documentary features the director standing in his yard with his dogs running behind him complaining about the series he tried to make and how it was cancelled, basically wearing his bitterness on his sleeve.  I thought this film was about a family of hillbillies being taken across country to Hollywood? 

So, the director pulls up in a motor home and picks up a family from rural Appalachia, the family that was supposed to be on the series and they head off across country to California.  The family is charismatic, and yes some stereotypes are definitely in place with them, and there are some expected "aw shucks" kind of moments but they are so much more than those stereotypes or aw shucks moments.  They are good people and they are so likable it's often a joy to travel with them in the film.  They are naive to much of the outside world beyond the borders of their farm but they seem to take it all in with open minds, which is outside the stereotypes put upon people from the deep south.  They visit the Grand Canyon and other towns on their way to Hollywood which is where they experience the bulk of the offbeat things I'm sure were intended for the series.  They go to the ocean, they spend their first night in a hotel, and they visit some very offbeat street people in the city.

Just when things get interesting the director is always able to pull the focus from the family back to himself and the lose of his series.  Now, obviously the family lost the series too, but they are getting a good bit of that experience now and that's the most interesting part of the film.  Any deviation from that is a failure.  The director could share everything the audience needs to know about the cancelation of the television series in two title cards at the beginning of the film and then the focus could stay totally on the family experience, and we'd have a truly interesting film.

Overall Review 3/10

-Stephen Lackey