Movie Review: Wild Cat, a Bio-Pic of Flannery O’Connor
In Wild Cat, Ethan Hawke and his daughter Maya make an admirable attempt to honor Flannery O’Connor with a film titled after one of her early short stories. Hawke .recreates Flannery O’Connor (at an early point in her writing life) and dramatizes some of her stories. Dark, episodic, and full of quotations from O’Connor herself, Wild Cat is clearly not meant for a general audience. Its primary appeal is to those who know O’Connor and her work well.
Covering the period in O’Connor’s life (around 1950) just after she was diagnosed with lupus, Wild Cat combines fact and fiction. With the diagnosis, O’Connor was thwarted in her attempt to continue her writing career away from the town (Milledgeville, Georgia) where she mainly grew up. She also wanted to distance herself from her family (her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor and Regina’s sisters, also part of the household). During this time, O’Connor was also trying to achieve a balance between her love for writing and her dedication to God, a central conflict in A Prayer Journal (2013), the brief spiritual diary she kept during her first year at the University of Iowa. Ethan Hawke says he was influenced by this diary.
Filmed in rural Kentucky rather than Georgia, Wild Cat is dark, both literally and figuratively. Early scenes are set at the University of Iowa and in New York City in the late 1940s. At Iowa, Hawkes create O’Connor as a brilliant outsider, intellectually superior to her colleagues but socially insecure. One outstanding scene in the film actually occurred at Iowa in 1948 when O’Connor read one of her stories in the Workshop. It was so superior that her instructor, Andrew Lytle, dismissed the class after her reading, feeling that the story needed no criticism.
In the New York scene, Hawke reveals O’Connor’s problems with, John Selby, then editor-in-chief at Rinehart, who had little understanding of Wise Blood, her first novel. He urged O’Connor to produce a more saleable novel. Using text from O’Connor’s own letters, the film depicts her spirited defense of her work and her refusal to make changes.
A less realistic treatment of her time in New York involves her relationship with the poet Robert Lowell whom she met at Yaddo, the artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York in 1948. The film suggests a romantic relationship between the two that ends when Lowell announces his engagement to Elizabeth Hardwick, another writer. O’Connor did love and admire Lowell, but her only near romance during that period was with Robie Macaulay, a writer whom she met at Iowa. That relationship was doomed because Macaulay was already engaged to another woman..
After the New York scenes, Hawke portrays O’Connor’s reluctant return to Milledgeville and her family. His treatment of her return makes her seem more miserable than she actually was. To their credit, Hawke does use an important quotation from one of O’Connor’s letters to her friend, Maryat Lee, in which she reveals that she first believed her years of writing would end after her return, but she came to realize that time as a writer had only begun.
A pivotal scene in Wild Cat depicts O’Connor as bedridden, both physically and spiritually. Hawke concocts the episode that features Liam Neeson, as the local priest, who has come to offer O’Connor spiritual guidance. A similar scene occurs in O’Connor’s short story, “The Enduring Chill.” Hawke even gives the priest the same name, Block, as the stupid priest in the story. The episode, in my opinion, exaggerates O’Connor’s physical and spiritual condition; another reviewer, however, finds the melodramatic scene ”tense but transcendent.”
Wild Cat realistically analyzes the complex relationship between O’Connor and her mother: Though Regina and Flannery held different outlooks on life and literature, the letters O’Connor wrote to her mother when she was at Iowa show the actual strength of their connection. In the film, Laura Linney portrays Regina with understanding and grace.
Maya Hawke evokes Flannery O’Connor with mixed results. She makes a clear effort to understand O’Connor but puts more effort into depicting O’Connor’s suffering than showing her as a brilliant writer who refused to let her illness curb her career. Whoever costumed Maya for the role did not understand that O’Connor, no Southern Belle, still cared about her appearance. Throughout the film, Maya, wearing a hideous wig and unattractive dresses, looks thin, tired, and miserable.
Hawke creates partial adaptations of O’Connor’s well-known short stories, including “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Good Country People,” “Parker’s Back,” “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” “The Enduring Chill,” and “Revelation.” Since shifts between biography and story adaptation are often abrupt, certain sections of the movie are confusing, particularly when Maya Hawke plays both O’Connor herself and partly autobiographical characters in the stories. In one disconcerting scene, Maya, dressed as a man, portrays Julian from “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” The best scene in the adaptations is the doctor’s waiting room in “Revelation.” Laura Linney creates a perfect version of Ruby Turpin.
As a self-admitted enthusiast of O’Connor and her work, I probably over emphasize weaknesses in the film, especially its distortion of fact. Ethan Hawke himself sees his movie as “a fever dream” rather than a realistic biography. Angela Alaimo O’Donnell thinks Hawke’s “devotion to detail [and] his effort to capture the spirit of O’Connor” offers “perfect homage“ to the writer. Another reviewer thinks Maya Hawke’s portrayal of O’Connor worthy of an Oscar nomination (She didn’t get one).
Note: the film is available on Amazon Prime.
