1,194 words 
Every movie should be a work of love, but astonishingly few are. A notable exception is Wildcat, the 2023 biopic about Flannery O’Connor, directed by Ethan Hawke from a script that he coauthored with Shelby Gaines. Wildcat is something of a family affair, for it stars Ethan Hawke’s daughter Maya as Flannery O’Connor herself. Maya’s brother Levon Hawke also has a bit part. (Their mother is Uma Thurman. Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman starred together in the stupid anti-eugenics flick Gattaca, which fortunately did not deter them from their own successful eugenic experiments.)
The screenwriters’ affection for O’Connor is clear from their choice of her most characteristic, colorful, and profound quotes, based on a wide acquaintance with her works. Many of these statements are placed in new contexts but without distorting their meaning. Even when the dialogue is fictional, it sounds just like Flannery. There’s never a false note. There is also a wealth well-chosen, mundane biographical touches that only genuine fans would include, like Flannery’s Georgia Bulldogs sweatshirt, her self-portrait with a pheasant, the various books she read, and her pet peacocks.
But Wildcat doesn’t just get the surface right. It also plumbs the depths. Flannery O’Connor was an intellectual and artistic prodigy born to a wealthy, well-connected, but quite conventional Southern Catholic family. Everything about her character would work to alienate her from her family and community. Moreover, the entire cultural establishment would work to heighten that alienation and turn her into a progressive. Her darkly satirical and sometimes disturbingly violent stories set in the South definitely appealed to Northern intellectuals.
But O’Connor could not be assimilated. Her understanding of good and evil did not map out along the differences between North and South, progressive or reactionary. Instead, O’Connor was a devout Catholic, which led her to being a conservative. O’Connor did not believe that we are progressing our way toward a world without evil or mystery. She had a deep sense of human finitude that tied her to her birthplace and culture. But the South was not just her home. It was where she stood, her viewpoint from which she saw the whole world and approached the eternal. O’Connor was, moreover, wise to the ways of intellectuals, because she was one, and but for the grace of God, she would have been a progressive intellectual, a tribe that she satirized mercilessly. (In the film, O’Connor is just as alienated from most of her fellow graduate students as she is from her family back home.)
Wildcat is something of a hybrid of a conventional biopic and a dramatization of O’Connor’s stories. Because it tries to be two different kinds of movie at the same time, it can’t be either of them fully, simply due to time constraints.
As a biopic, it focuses only on a brief period of O’Connor’s life: her return to Georgia in 1950 when she began to suffer from lupus, the disease that killed her father and that killed her too, 14 years later. There are also flashbacks to her time at the University of Iowa, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree. It is so well done that I wish it covered more of O’Connor’s life.
Wildcat also dramatizes excerpts from such O’Connor stories as “The Comforts of Home,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “Good Country People,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Revelation,” and “Parker’s Back.” None of these stories is complete, but they are so good that you’ll wish they were. Image a world in which PBS, HBO, Disney, or Amazon did a weekly series of dramatizations of Flannery O’Connor stories, written and directed by people who love her work, rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars on filth, propaganda, and remakes thereof.
The cast and performances of Wildcat are excellent. Maya Hawke brings Flannery O’Connor back to life with both charm and emotional intensity. Laura Linney is extraordinary as Flannery’s mother Regina O’Connor.
But Hawke and Linney don’t just play Flannery and Regina O’Connor. They also play many of the characters in O’Connor’s stories. This makes sense, because O’Connor’s characters are sometimes projections of herself or her mother, usually minus their virtues.
In “Revelation,” Mary Grace is Flannery, and Mrs. Turpin is Regina. In “Good Country People,” Hulga is Flannery, and Mrs. Hopewell is Regina. In “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” Julian is a male version of Flannery, and her mother is Regina. I was, however, caught unawares by the parallels in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” between Flannery and the deaf mute Lucynell Crater and between Regina and Lucynell’s mother, also named Lucynell Crater.
If you put Linney’s depictions of Regina, Mrs. Turpin, and Mrs. Hopewell side-by-side with her depiction of Mrs. Crater, you’ll marvel at her versatility.
Philip Ettinger is outstanding as the bipolar, alcoholic poet Robert Lowell. Wildcat depicts mutual romantic interest between him and Flannery. Rafael Casal is excellent as O. E. Parker in “Parker’s Back.” Cooper Hoffman (the son of Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is also excellent as Manley Pointer in “Good Country People,” which is my favorite of these adaptations.
Another remarkable and moving performance is Liam Neeson as Father Flynn, who visits Flannery when she is sick. This scene is based on a similar scene in “The Enduring Chill,” in which a male Flannery type named Asbury returns to his mother’s dairy farm in the South with a mysterious illness and requests to see a priest, not because he believes in God but because his mother bores him, and he wants to have an intellectual conversation. Father Finn, however, proves to be a disappointment because he’s hard-of-hearing and offers nothing to titillate Asbury’s intellectual vanity.
In Wildcat, however, Flannery’s conversation with Father Flynn is more productive. After some perfunctory remarks and pamphlets, both Flynn and Flannery open up. She’s obviously trying to grapple with an illness that will change the rest of her life. But an abiding issue is her intellectual pride, which she thinks gets in the way of her relationship with God. She also struggles to be combine her “scandalous” writing with being a good Catholic. Flynn urges her to be truthful in her writing, don’t worry about “scandal,” and let God sort out the consequences. The dialogue is based largely on Flannery’s correspondence, and Maya Hawke’s delivery is emotionally searing.
Father Flynn suggests that maybe one day, Flannery will even see her sickness as a blessing. Flannery’s illness forced her to constrict her world, simplify her life, and focus on what was most important: her work, which she came to see as a way of serving God, not as a freakish eccentricity. As a token of these reordered priorities, she moves her writing desk from her window to the center of her room, piling furniture up behind it to create an altar.
I highly recommend Wildcat. I wish there were a lot more movies like it. Even if you cannot relate to O’Connor’s intense Christian faith, there’s still much to admire in her and in this film. Wildcat is a serious, artful, and loving tribute to one of America’s greatest writers, whose 100th birthday will be commemorated on March 25th.
30 comments
Nice review. I look forward to watching Wildcat.
Thanks for informing me about this movie. I like her prose style! On second thought I may not watch it bc I like to know as little about the artist as possible.
I had no idea this movie existed, and as an unreconstructed Southerner, I love O’Connor’s writing. Thanks for the review, can’t wait to watch it.
Love Flannery O’Connor
I wish CC would stop being so anti Catholic.
?
At the risk of CC censoring my comment, I would just say that this article, while good, has an anti Catholic tone to the like of: “we love Flannery, even though she was Catholic”. The “we have to tolerate the Catholics sometimes, even though they’re deluded” attitude is pretty common here on CC. Some writers are more hostile than others, like Jim Goad. And Kenny, calling it “Abrahamic mythology” betrays your attitude.
Here in Québec, Catholicism is inseparable from our French Canadian identity. A lot of (white) nations are like this. France is “la fille ainée de l’Église” despite the Révolution. I think that anglophones tend to have a more pragmatic view of nationalism and race, and such pragmatism would destroy a nation like ours. I’ve tried to get you guys to have some of our best speakers on your shows to talk about this (la condition québécoise), but to no avail.
Anyway, I generally like what you do at CC and just ignore you when you talk about religion.
The cross-critical comments here are nothing out of bounds like you’d get from volume-maxxing anti-White whiners. There are as many counter-arguments who see christianity as a stabilizer of social order, the church as it once was as a kind of indispensable ethereal loci for White believers who have many children. I believe Lord Shang has taken the pro position in many of the nay or yay christian essays on CC. Even the harshest critics hardly approximate gus hall or the red cleric jacques gaillot.
Im a catholic and I have never gotten that sense from CC and I’m sensitive to it. One writer has done some anti Christian things on his own channel but behaves himself here. Now, there is a machevellian sense to CC sometimes but if Europeans don’t survive physically, they can’t be converted; that’s my attitude. So any movement that’s saves our people and even makes them be fruitful and multiply is alright by this Catholic Cracker.
great review I only knew good man is hard to find. I had read O’Connor was influenced by a particular Catholic mystic writer and I have always been a little shy about reading her because of possible modernist undercurrents.. But I’ll definitely check out wildcat
I guess we just have different points of view, Hi-ya. But whatever, I don’t want to quibble about this. While I like E. Micheal Jones, I’m not one of those Catholics who thinks his stupid view on race is real or true. However, in the real world, some of my (white) nationalists friends or those in my circles have delved into miscegenation. To give them credit, they did so with full knowledge of all the problems this will create and their spouses are culturally and linguistically like us. So what are we supposed to do? Disown them? Fortuanately, the kids look white in one of those said couples. I heard someone say yesterday about that little boy that “God intervened”.
Which is her opus magnum and which is her best short story? I may want to visit her some day.
Her best novel is Wise Blood. As for short stories, “Good Country People” and “The Life You Save May be Your Own.”
Isn’t Wise Blood her only novel? But to answer your question Peter, just get one of her two short story collections (or both), and just read a story every night. That’s what I did and I found that I kept wanting to come back each night and finished the books pretty quickly. The first one I ever read was Everything that rises must converge and that one got me coming back. It’s hard to tell what her worldview is if you know nothing about her.
Her second novel is The Violent Bear It Away.
Her best novel is Wise Blood. As for short stories, try “Good Country People” and “The Life You Save May be Your Own.”
Thank you for this review. I love both American and European Gothic literature and Flannery O’Connor is one of the best American, Southern Gothic writers. I wasn’t aware of this film and will definitely add it to my top priority films to watch.
As for Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, they were a beautiful Nordic, White couple (an increasingly rare sight in America these days). It’s a shame they divorced and didn’t have more “successful eugenic experiments” 😉
Ethan Hawke had two more daughters with his second wife Ryan Shawhughes, and Uma Thurman has had another daughter with French financier Arpad Busson. Surely, the world is a better place.
Oh, yes, I forgot about their other partners. It’s great that they’ve both brought so many White children into the world.
I very much liked the esthetics of the GATTACA movie. Can having genetically enhanced WHITE children be actually a good thing?
Of course it is a good thing. Gattaca was anti-eugenic propaganda.
Heard it was terrible but I do remember that Gore Vidal was in it, who was my political entryway that would usher his blind senator grandfather onto the floor of congress to speak. Vidal hated lying and spoke on what frauds these muppets selected by the boardrooms really were. Nothing explicitly racial nor anti-jewish that I recall but I doubt his prickly nature in private were fans of either. “I’ve been around the ruling class all my life and have been well aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.”
When it comes to film you are a hard man to please, because your experience is deep and your compass is clear (but not just black and white). And given the sorry state of this media, it’s rare for a new film to escape your gaze unscathed. Being myself a very undisciplined viewer, I am still almost constantly assaulted by what I see on screens. Thanks for this review. Clearly this one is worth seeing.
Nice article. I first read her in freshman year of college. Quite enjoyable and not long stories. I’ll try to check it out.
I saw a Danish film “The Promised Land.” Nice story about Danish history and some clans. No idea how brutal it could be back then. Learned a new term. Darkling. Bad luck if you have one.
“Darkling I listen, and for many a time I have been in love with easeful death.”
Has TL, Counter Currents reviewed the new movie “The Order” based on the real life White nationalist revolutionaries “the Order” led by Bob Matthews?
The critical reviews and regular viewer reviews are solid, positive. But, well….
I’m very familiar with the real “the Order”.
With a similar theme. I did like the movie starring Tom Berenger and (yeah, Je*) Debra Winger “Betrayed”.
Regards
JR
I liked “Betrayed” as well, deserves a review.
I was not aware of this movie until I saw this article here on Counter-Currents. Flannery O’Connor is my favorite author, besides Philip K. Dick, so of course I had to watch the movie tonight. Overall, I really enjoyed it. Thank you for the recommendation. It did take some liberties with her stories that were worked in to the movie (I have read all her stories and novels, but not her letters), but the liberties taken were not egregious.
My only real complaint is that the audio mix of the actors’ voices was bad. I had to turn on the subtitles to understand what they were saying, and I was wearing really good quality headphones when I watched it, and I’m from the South, so it wasn’t like I couldn’t understand the accents, it was just a bad audio mix.
Like I wrote, I enjoyed this move, and I do recommend it. I also highly recommend the John Huston version of “Wise Blood”, which has been reviewed here at Counter-Currents:
https://counter-currents.com/2020/03/wise-blood/
It is free to watch on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZJVsjUbyTg
Trevor Lynch recently wrote here on Counter-Currents about David Lynch, shortly after he died. I think that David Lynch was profoundly influenced by Flannery O’Connor, and also by Huston’s film version of “Wise Blood”, which starred Brad Dourif and Harry Dean Stanton, who would both, many years later, be cast in several films by David Lynch.
Thank you for the recommendation of “Wildcat”, I really enjoyed watching it.
Thank you. I am glad you enjoyed it. I agree about Wise Blood.
A lot of movies these days have dialogue that is hard to nunderstand. Interestingly, there is a trend now toward using subtitles even with films in one’s own language. I thought I was odd for doing that.
I’ve been doing this for years. You will be surprised at what all you miss when you watch with the subtitles on.
My only real complaint is that the audio mix of the actors’ voices was bad. I had to turn on the subtitles to understand what they were saying, and I was wearing really good quality headphones when I watched it, and I’m from the South, so it wasn’t like I couldn’t understand the accents, it was just a bad audio mix.
I have to do that all the time now. I used to think it was just because I was getting older and didn’t hear as well, but when I watch older movies (say, anything pre-2000), I never have any trouble hearing what the characters are saying. I sort of recall reading/hearing somewhere that it has to do with how audio is mixed now.
I couldn’t get through it.
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