I am a member of Wildcat’s core demographic: I’m a white woman, I’m a fan of Ethan Hawke’s underrated previous film Blaze (a tender biopic depicting the difficult life of folk singer Blaze Foley), and I found his daughter Maya Hawke’s performance in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City to be a charming standout earlier this year. Perhaps most importantly, I’m a voracious reader of the great Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor’s fiction and personal letters.
Therefore, I was beyond excited when I found out the Hawkes were collaborating on a film about Flannery O’Connor’s life; although her life was short (she died at age 39 from lupus), it was certainly not devoid of interesting material. O’Connor’s complex relationship with her strict Roman Catholic faith, her fraught but close relationship with her mother, her relationship to her chronic illness and her relationship with herself as a woman writer are all ripe subjects for examination by a filmmaker, such as Ethan Hawke, with a keenly empathetic eye. Regrettably, a gross number of missteps overshadow the Hawkes’ good intentions with this film. Even without Maya Hawke’s frumpy hag drag as O’Connor, complete with too-large dentures and an unfortunate wig, the lack of creative risk taken by the filmmakers, as well as the lack of research done by the team, sinks Wildcat before it gets started.
Wildcat is not a swing and a miss—the Hawkes would first have to take a swing at either a bold performance or inventive narrative structure, neither of which are present here. O’Connor was a woman who took a lot of risks in her work and O’Connor diehards deserve a film that does the same. In trying to please everyone with a film about a truly unique person, the Hawkes have accidentally made a film with no audience. Wildcat is not for anyone.
Wildcat is neither for diehard Flannery fans, who will be expecting both more fire from Hawke’s performance and a more inventive narrative from the director; nor is the film for a more general commercial audience, who will surely be bored to tears. Wildcat follows O’Connor, after she moves back in with her mother (Laura Linney) in Milledgeville, Georgia, and her struggle to complete her first novel Wise Blood in the face of her fight against lupus. O’Connor’s life is intercut with excerpts from her short stories, which are woven into the narrative through small details in her life as they make their way into her writing.
The head-scratching choice to cast Maya Hawke in the role of both O’Connor and her characters makes it clear that this project’s aim is more related to giving Hawke more screentime and less to do with channeling the spirit of O’Connor. Her weak performance lends zero credence to this decision: Her southern accent is so thin and her facial expressions so openly gawking and naïve that it’s embarrassing to watch. The film opens with a fake black-and-white movie trailer, also starring Hawke—what purpose could this “trailer” possibly serve, other than further showcasing her? This casting choice puts the idea in our mind that the author is also her characters, and vice versa, which is not at all the case.
O’Connor did not write autofiction. Sure, she drew from details of her own life, as many writers do, but O’Connor was a deliberate architect of her characters’ lives. She didn’t live those lives herself. In retelling her short story “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” the filmmakers have changed the gender of the main character Julian to jam Hawke into the role. This creative bending plants the idea that O’Connor was not merely the puppetmaster pulling the strings behind her characters, but one of the characters themselves. In this instance, the filmmakers imply that O’Connor was someone who was ashamed of her mother’s racism, in the same way that the main character of the story is ashamed when his mother condescendingly offers a young Black boy a penny. Perhaps she was sometimes ashamed of her mother’s racism, but that is precisely why she chose to channel her feelings into her stories, instead of writing memoirs.
This serves to highlight one of Wildcat’s most confusing narrative choices: To falsely skew the narrative to make O’Connor appear more racially progressive than she truly was. It does not take much research to discover that O’Connor was nothing of the sort—after all, she was a white woman born in 1925 who lived most of her life in Georgia. A dinner party scene implies that O’Connor only used the N-word in her fiction because it was realistic to the way white people spoke in the South. This is not the case. There is plenty of documented proof of O’Connor using that word frequently in her personal life, not just in her fiction. Not only does Wildcat fail to reconcile O’Connor’s relationship with race, but it also covers up the fact that she was actually racist, which leads me to believe that the Hawkes don’t trust their audience to grapple with the fact that a brilliant writer could also be a bigot.
The Hawkes would have been better off making a string of short films out of O’Connor’s short fiction, as those segments are the most inspired sections of Wildcat. There, a different nepo baby steals the show, even though he is afforded very little time to do so. Casting Cooper Hoffman as Manley Pointer in the O’Connor short story “Good Country People” is Wildcat’s best move. The mischievous glint in Hoffman’s eye, despite a wholesome veneer, makes Hoffman’s performance perfect at bringing Pointer to life. Hoffman’s minor role has more fire in it than Hawke’s entire performance as the woman who created him.
O’Connor is known for fiercely defending her faith with a famous line regarding the Eucharist: “Well, if it’s just a symbol, then to hell with it.” Although she is supposed to be portraying a woman who took her faith more seriously than anything else in her life, Hawke mutters this line behind her hand, making it clear that she doesn’t believe a word she’s saying. The corny final shot, which depicts O’Connor as a peacock (her most beloved animal), makes it clear that Wildcat sees O’Connor’s real, intricate life as a mere symbol. To hell with it.
Director: Ethan Hawke
Writers: Ethan Hawke, Shelby Gaines
Starring: Maya Hawke, Laura Linney, Philip Ettinger, Cooper Hoffman
Release Date: September 1, 2023 (Telluride)
Brooklyn-based film writer Katarina Docalovich was raised in an independent video store and never really left. Her passions include sipping lime seltzer, trying on perfume and spending hours theorizing about Survivor. You can find her scattered thoughts as well as her writing on Twitter.