Wildcat

1,194 words ^[1]

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 ^[2], 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.