The Pen in Hand Guide to the Movies: Review of “Wildcat”

Illustration by Michael DiMilo

★★★★ 1/2

For the Love of God: Review of Wildcat

By Geoff Carter

The creative process is a mystery. Understanding how and why individuals are driven to give up their time, wealth, energy, even their happiness in the pursuit of artistic perfection can make for compelling cinema, but trying to capture the internal struggles of the artist on film presents a myriad of difficulties. Movies examining the lives of famous artists can be brilliant—or banal—depending on how they depict the inner workings of the creative mind, or, in some cases, examining how society exploits and diminishes the misunderstood artist.

Wildcat, Ethan Hawke’s film about author Flannery O’Connor, examines not only the roots of this artist’s inspiration but also attempts to connect them to her struggles to realize her vision of a contradictory world full of sin, redemption, absolution, and epiphany and somehow reconcile it with her own religious beliefs. Shelby Gaines and Ethan Hawke’s screenplay sets up its narrative core through the confluence of the author’s life experience and its effect—direct and indirect—on her work.

It’s been said that most writers have the same four or five characters rattling around in their heads. This is eminently evident in Wildcat. Hawke has created a narrative device in which O’Connor’s stories—while still fermenting in her imagination—are played out on the screen. These stories, including A Good Man is Hard to Find, All That Rises Must Converge, and The Life You Save May Be Your Own include incarnations of O’Connor herself and her mother, while the various predatory males are played by a variety of actors, including Steve Zahn, Rafael Casal, and Cooper Hoffman. 

By interspersing dramatizations of these stories with depictions of her actual life, Hawke not only provides an understanding of the culture which spawned Flannery O’Connor, but also subtly demonstrates the process by which she translated her fear, tension, and loathing of her world into a fictive universe incorporating flawed, grotesque, and corrupt characters—and their acts of unwitting, unwilling, or even accidental redemption. 

The film opens with a black and white movie house style trailer advertising the new blockbuster film based on Flannery O’Connor’s latest novel, a reference to her burning ambition to write a great novel (and perhaps a tongue-in-cheek reference to Wildcat itself). The film then moves to her interview with publisher John Selby (Alessandro Nivolo) set up by her writing teacher Robert “Cal” Lowell (Philip Ettinger) with whom O’Connor seems smitten. 

Selby tries to persuade O’Connor to edit her manuscript to make it more palatable for the regular reader, but she refuses to compromise her vision. She later meets Cal at the train station where he is seeing her off on a visit to her hometown in Georgia. The two obviously have a close relationship based on their love of writing and literature spiced with a hint of the romantic. Cal seems accepting of, even amused, by O’Connor’s eccentricities and sometimes abrasive personality, but stops short of committing to a romantic relationship. At Flannery’s request, he buys her two copies of the New York Times which she—strangely enough—crumples up and stuffs inside her jacket to, as it turns out, keep herself warm. When she meets her mother Regina (Laura Linney), it is revealed that Flannery has lupus and therefore has the chills. During the contentious car ride home, Regina asks Flannery why she can’t write stories people might like and agrees with her friend Duchess (Christine Dye) that Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind was a masterpiece. 

The film flashes back to O’Connor’s early days in New York attending Cal’s class. He invites her to a party at the home of Elizabeth Hardwick (Willa Fitzgerald) where Flannery’s abrasive and blunt style, along with her barely concealed contempt for society, mark her as an outsider, much like the characters in her short stories, particularly the deaf and mute character Lucynell in The Life You Save May Be Your Own. In fact, the film’s dramatization of the story has Maya Hawke playing Lucynell and Laura Linney playing the callous and opportunistic mother. 

After returning to her hometown of Milledgeville, O’Connor immerses herself in her writing as her symptoms worsen. During a severe bout with the disease, she asks to see Father Flynn (Liam Neeson) with whom she a discussion about her attempts to be a good Catholic, James Joyce’s Ulysses (which Father Flynn says should not have been banned), and her other struggles. Despite her cynicism, her dark sense of humor, deeply felt disappointments, and anger, her faith in the church has remained unshaken. 

O’Connor’s loathing of the ingrained racism in the South is manifested in another dramatization of one of her short stories Everything the Rises Must Converge, in which Mrs. Chestny (Linney) a matronly and arrogant white woman is admonished by a black woman for her condescending attitude while trying to give her child a penny. In this scenario, Hawke plays the woman’s son Julian whose attempts to tell his mother she is being racist fall on deaf ears. 

The convoluted timeline of the narrative, including the seemingly random order of the presentation of O’Connor’s stories, do not concentrate on the events of her life, but rather on the cultural forces and creative psyche that created them. The domineering but well-intentioned mother, the naïve and socially ostracized young woman, and the manipulative and untrustworthy young men occur again and again and again, but never grow old. It is O’Connors blessing—and curse—to try to make sense of the complexities of faith, trust, love, betrayal, and redemption through her work. 

Maya Hawke delivers a superb performance as the tortured and brilliant Flannery O’Connor as well as portraying the various characters in her stories. From her obvious vulnerability—and rubishness—on the train home to Georgia to her cynical appraisal of the southern grotesque to her time as a promising student in New York City, to her obvious devotion to the Catholic faith, she embodies all the foibles and strengths of the renowned author. 

As always, Laura Linney delivers a stellar performance as Regina. Her charming down-home southern belle demeanor is perfectly calibrated. As the characters in the short stories, she displays an impressive range.

Wildcat delivers a complex and resonant psychological portrait of one of the most singular voices in American literature. Like Flannery O’Connor’s work, it is a beautiful, harrowing, and ultimately unsettling work.