Photo: Toronto International Film Festival
Wildcat film still
Maya Hawke in ‘Wildcat’
Wildcat can be called a biographical film about Flannery O’Connor, but it’s not a “bio-pic” in any conventional sense. Director and cowriter Ethan Hawke plays scrabble with the usual expectations, taking the posthumously beloved storywriter in and out of time and place, skipping between visualizations of her stories, her inner fantasies and scenes from her life.
The director gave his daughter, Maya Hawke, the starring role as O’Connor, and she performs with great aptitude. Maya looks like O’Connor—the frazzled hair and thick glasses, but more vitally, the pained expression and body language. She appears as uncomfortable as a hawk trapped inside a house.
O’Connor is usually described as a Southern gothic author, shorthand that only begins to describe the sources for her blackly comic, violent, occasionally grotesque fiction. She was a minority among the white Southerners of her small Georgia hometown, a Roman Catholic among Protestant fundamentalists. The crackbrained religiosity of the South found its greatest treatment in her novel Wiseblood, concerning a preacher who founded the Church of Christ without Christ. Itinerant Southern preachers were always forming their own churches, claiming the Holy Spirit was ringing in their ears. O’Connor scoffed.
Wildcat film poster
But she took no comfort from the ethno-religious tribalism of her own clan. As depicted in Wildcat, relations with her family were strained (Laura Linney plays her mother). They expected her to produce another Gone with the Wind; instead, she gave them the ironically titled “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the tale of a squabbling family of vacationers murdered by the Misfit and his followers on a rural roadside.
O’Connor’s Catholicism is central to Wildcat. She’s depicted praying as often as typing, yet “faith is not a big electric blanket,” she insists. It’s not a cosmic insurance plan but a perspective onto the mystery of a world more paradoxical than logical, where tragedy is our fate and hope is a flickering candle in the dark. She understood the Catholic imperative toward good works but came to feel she accomplished this through her writing, which was nondidactic, never sermonizing and often scandalous to those who sought kitschy sentimentality in the Church.
“Creativity is nature manifesting in us,” she says. Wildcat shows her wrestling with the material of the lives she observed, transmuting that material through some strange alchemy into her stories. Her characters were often rural Southerners, tortured by the pull of sexuality and fantastical beliefs, formed from the clay of a poverty near Third World levels. She was alienated from their society, from her own family, from most of the fellows at the Iowa Writers Workshop and the New York intelligentsia. She refuses in one scene to “tidy up reality” by softening the words spoken by her racist characters. To ostensibly tolerant liberals, she insists that “truth doesn’t change according to your ability to stomach it.” She refuses to give an outline of Wiseblood to her publisher while writing the novel. She won’t be bound by that restriction. “I have to write to discover what I’m doing,” she insists.
O’Connor was a linear storyteller, so perhaps Hawke and cowriter Shelby Gaines made an odd choice by presenting her life in a nonlinear fashion. However, a “normal” Hollywood biography might easily have done O’Connor an injustice by tidying up her life. Wildcat is true to the messy spirit of one of America’s most remarkable authors.
Wildcat is screening at the Oriental Theatre.
