Review: Wildcat (2023)
Ethan Hawke directs his daughter Maya Hawke in this unblinking Flannery O'Connor biopic
Wildcat (2023)
Directed by Ethan Hawke
Written by Ethan Hawke and Shelby Gaines
Flannery O'Connor was an ornery person with a messy life. That’s not an unusual thing to say about a writer, but in Georgia, in the middle of the 20th century, she didn’t match stereotypes about how a woman should be a writer. She was Roman Catholic where most people were Baptist or another form of Protestant, she maintained her rural lifewas exiled to rural Georgia instead of living a bohemian life in New York1, and she wrote Southern Gothic stories and novels about weirdos when most editors and readers might have preferred a genteel presentation in both a writer and her works. As if these traits weren’t enough to isolate her, she was also a disabled person with a fatal illness.
Of course she was capable of getting along with people, and of fulfilling the role of celebrated writer at conferences and other events as well as in her hometown of Milledgeville, Ga. In her nonfiction she put forth her ideas about the role of the writer who is associated with the South and the role of a Catholic writer in secular society. She maintained a respectable life, even if the characters in her fiction did not.
But internally she fought a constant battle to align her life with the will of God, a standard by which she would always fail. And she fought a constant battle against lupus, an inherited auto-immune illness that, as it disabled and eventually killed her over a twenty-year period, subjected her to chronic pain and weakness. Following the direction of her faith to seek redemption through this suffering, and translating illness in her own body into a variety of moral failures in her fictional characters — flaws that nonetheless serve better to open a scoundrel to God’s grace than a pious churchgoer — she earned access to a deep understanding of human frailty, weakness, and violence.
“Wildcat” focuses on her life from the end of her MFA studies in the famous Iowa Writers Workshop2, which she attended from 1945 to 1947, to the early 1950s and her life with her mother Regina on the family farm outside Milledgeville, Ga. During this period O'Connor completed her first novel “Wise Blood,” as well as a number of short stories, and confronted the symptoms of her illness.
The O'Connor that “Wildcat” depicts displays some of her more difficult, practically anti-social qualities over more socially acceptable ones. In this film, played with real courage and commitment by Maya Hawke — whose father Ethan Hawke cowrote and directed the movie — she is achingly lonely, unable to make friends with contemporaries whether at grad school or at home, and preternaturally unable to suffer fools.
This is fully illustrated in a grad school party hosted by none other than poet Robert Lowell and his soon-to-be wife Elizabeth Hardwick (Willa Fitzgerald), herself a literary scholar. When a classmate (Wilson Conkwright) mocks O'Connor’s faith, Hardwick, playing the role of well-mannered hostess to a T, attempts to both defend her and to defuse the situation with niceties:
Classmate: My question is, do Christians, do Catholics, believe that they're actually eating Jesus, like cannibals? And if so, then how can you stand on a moral high ground?
Hardwick: Well, Walter, the question seems to be to me whether a person believes that we are created in God's image or whether he believes that we create God in our own. Now, I don't know the answer, but I do remember as a child when I would stand in line to receive the host, I always thought of it as the Holy Ghost — he seemed like the most portable person of the Trinity. Now I think of the Eucharist as a lovely expressive symbol —
O'Connor: If it's a symbol, then to hell with it!
Then, to the silenced attendees, O'Connor goes on speaking directly to her classmate:
It's a lot harder to believe than not to believe. What people don't understand is how much religion costs. They think that faith is a big electric blanket -- when really it's the cross.
But the genius in the scene is not its skill in knitting together two different things that O'Connor did say (though at different times3 4) nor in showing how O'Connor’s uncompromising witness to her faith complicated her relationships and alienated other people. The genius in the scene is that Maya Hawke is harsh when shutting down Harwick, but when she turns to the mocking classmate, her voice lowers and she leans forward, aching to be heard and understood. O'Connor would rather reach out to someone who suggests she’s a cannibal than to let the rough edges of her faith — the scandal of the eucharist and of the cross — be smoothed out by a party hostess.
In addition to biographical scenes in her creative writing seminar and at the Georgia farm Andalusia5 where she lived with her mother Regina (Laura Linney) and peacocks, the film stages scenes from several stories that O'Connor was working on in this period. When a young woman appears in the story — such as the one-legged would-be bohemian Hulga in “Good Country People” or the developmentally disabled Lucynell in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” — Hawke plays the part.6 This choice has the effect of suggesting that O’Connor identified with the women, victims of swindlers and drifters, more than with the thieves themselves, a notion that I would disagree with strongly. But these scenes do help today’s audiences — whose secular educations are no longer likely to include O’Connor on the reading list due to her period portrayals of Black southerners and her characters’ use of the N word — to understand how strange O’Connor’s work really was, and still is.
In addition to the strangeness of O’Connor’s work and the stark pain she lived in, the filmmakers have bathed the film in colorful washes. Few scenes appear with completely natural color; instead they are sepia-toned or green or yellow. This heightens the audience’s alienation and prevents the film from being pretty, which I think is for the best.
Maya Hawkes’ performance is pretty amazing, and Laura Linney as her mother also gives a fantastic Regina, balancing between propriety (after reading one of her daughter’s stories in a literary magazine: “Well, I don't understand why you don't want to write something that people would like to read”) and an unshakable love for Flannery. And while some might disagree with his directorial choices, Ethan Hawke does a splendid job helming the film.
“Wildcat” is not a complete film biography of O’Connor. Aside from the famous incident from her childhood in which she appeared in a newsreel with a chicken that she had taught to walk backwards, we don’t see anything in her life before 1947 or after the early 1950s. The film thus necessarily makes it seem that the years that it covers — years when she was working on both the short story collection “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and her first novel, “Wise Blood,” the works for which she is most celebrated — were the turning point in her life.
This seems to me to be a simplification at least, and probably misleading. Surely the last fifteen years of her life were when she gained much maturity in her social relationships and in her religious faith, not to mention the work that she did, including her second novel and second collection of stories, plus many articles and talks. But they are also beyond the scope of the film, which addresses them in a title card stating that O’Connor remained at Andalusia for the rest of her life, writing right up to her death from lupus in 1964, aged 39. We’ll never get a movie about the whole of O’Connor’s career that also attempts to include her spiritual side. What is truly admirable about “Wildcat,” despite any flaws, is that it wrestles with both sides.
For a documentary treatment of O’Connor’s life and work, watch this hour-long program broadcast in 2023 by PBS:
https://www.pbs.org/video/uncommon-grace-the-life-of-flannery-oconnor-yv87qa/
It would be interesting to compare O’Connor’s abbreviated life as a writer in the literary capital of New York, which she was ultimately denied because of her illness, with that of Thomas Merton, a Catholic writer who lived this life for two short years before joining the Carthusian order in Kentucky, where he would spend the rest of his life.
The film elides the Iowa setting during the grad school scenes, implying that her studies took place in New York.
https://catholicexchange.com/if-its-just-a-symbol-to-hell-with-it/
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1985/may-17/faith-is-not-electric-blanket.html
http://andalusiafarm.org/
For a complete list of the O’Connor stories excerpted in “Wildcat,” as well as a Roman Catholic perspective on the film, see this review by Fr. Damian Ference: https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/capturing-a-misfit-a-review-of-wildcat/