Flannery O’Connor is complex. Not just in her literary work for which she is so well known for, but also in her life which, more often than not, was riddled with contradiction. Born and raised in Georgia, O’Connor grew up surrounded by the customs and beliefs long associated with the Deep South. Many of her personal views were racist even though her literary work is often seen as pushing back against the segregationist ideas of the time. She was a woman in constant conflict with herself, which is why a biopic about her life had the potential to dive into the nuanced complexities of her legacy as a writer. Unfortunately, Ethan Hawke missed the opportunity to create a critical yet sympathetic portrayal of the late writer in his latest film, Wildcat, choosing instead to gloss over the grittier bits of O’Connor’s personality in order to romanticize her story ad nauseum.
Wildcat seeks to capture the brilliance of O’Connor’s mind by bringing her stories to life on screen. O’Connor—who is played by Hawke’s own daughter, Maya—comes off as mousey and undefined. She moves through each scene like a less interesting and less assertive Jo March, mumbling about Nietzsche, James Joyce and God in what can only be described as a mawkish Southern drawl. For a writer who is supposed to be one of the greatest of her generation, Hawke’s portrayal of her comes across like an unenthusiastic ghost of herself. This most likely isn’t due to Hawke’s chops as an actor—nepotism aside, she is consistently fun to watch in a myriad of things—but rather the lack of care afforded to O’Connor’s character in the script itself. Though we do watch O’Connor navigate her deteriorating health due to lupus, Wildcat spends so much time trying to be unique in its inclusion of O’Connor’s literary worlds that it forgets that one of the most important things is the writer herself.
O’Connor’s stories come to life by way of enthusiastic daydreams experienced by the writer throughout her daily life. After seeing a man with only one arm seated at a train station, O’Connor immediately enters into a fantasy of her short story, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” in which she envisions herself in the role of the mute daughter. A handful of some of O’Connor’s best works are turned into brief imaginings—with all the parts being played by the same handful of actors—seemingly meant to give context to both the writer’s inner and outer worlds. However, even to the biggest O’Connor fans, these dream-like scenarios never truly capture the essence of what it’s like to experience O’Connor’s work on the page. Instead, these reimaginings cheapen the work almost to the point of comedy, too caught up in their own self-indulgence to ever really say anything worthwhile.
But let’s return to the matter of O’Connor’s racism. For a writer who spent so much of her time telling stories about characters and their relationship to the grotesque, it would seem only natural that in a film about the author herself, O’Connor’s own grotesque attributes would be put on full display. Especially since in recent years, her work has come under new criticism, seeking to bring to light O’Connor’s horrible prejudices in order to reckon with whether or not her work is still deserving of all its praise. Hawke addresses the racism through the inclusion of some of O’Connor’s stories—“Revelation” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge” are the two most obvious examples—but fails to attribute any of the negative viewpoints to the writer herself, choosing instead to make O’Connor out to be nothing but a forward thinking, accepting woman. There really isn’t much to say about this other than make it make sense.
Ethan Hawke is always one to boast a little too big for his own britches—which is probably why he makes such a charming Jesse in The Before Trilogy—and because of this, Wildcat ends up feeling more like the romanticization of one of literature’s most talked about writers than an actual honest look into her complicated life. They say good men are hard to find, but apparently, so are films.
Photo courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories
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