TIFF23: Wildcat

“Why don’t you write something that people enjoy reading?” Regina O’Connor (Laura Linney) poses this question to her daughter Flannery (Maya Hawke) late in Ethan Hawke’s Wildcat. The film is a fictionalization of the life and work of the famous American novelist, who died young and continues to embody the possibilities of religious artistry within the world of fiction. Flannery rebukes her mother’s question, insisting she’s interested in writing that is personal and true, not writing that is commercial or palatable. Hawke’s film showcases a similar disinterest in commercial viability.

This is a difficult film, rambling, passionate, happy to speechify and dispense with the usual way of doing things. It’s not quite a biopic, although it spends much of the runtime depicting lightly-fictionalized events from the life of Flannery O’Connor, both before and after her diagnosis with lupus. But the rest of the runtime is devoted to Flannery’s writing.

In vignettes, we see her short stories come to life, most memorably near the film’s close with a shortened version of perhaps her most famous story, “Good Country People.” In the vignettes, Hawke casts the same actors who portray Flannery and her family members, as well as key guest performers, including Cooper Hoffman and Steve Zahn. We then hear Maya Hawke’s Flannery read lines from the stories as we see the situations play out on screen.

The artistic decision to have the same performers in both the fictional and the biographical elements of the film speaks to Hawke’s belief that Flannery O’Connor is best understood through her work. Furthermore, Hawke believes that, even more than usual for an artist, Flannery embedded herself, her family, her Roman Catholicism, and her life on Andalusia Farm in Georgia into her writing. To understand Flannery O’Connor, Hawke seems to be arguing, you need only read her work, so his film obliges by bringing that writing to life.

Thus, Hawke’s entire depiction of Flannery O’Connor in Wildcat is dependent on her writing, not so much her biographical details. We get a few moments of her life, such as her diagnosis and her leaving the Writers’ Workshop to return to Andalusia Farm, but mostly we get free flowing scenes that let Hawke and co-writer Shelby Gaines showcase Flannery O’Connor’s writing.

For instance, in scenes with her mother or with other writers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, Hawke borrows lines from Flannery’s writing as dialogue within the scenes. In one of the film’s most memorable moments, a fellow student suggests that Flannery stop using the n-word in her fiction, to which she passionately exclaims that the people she’s writing about use the ugly word, and so will her writing, saying “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.” This line comes from a 1955 letter to Betty Hester. Later at the party, she explains that people “think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross,” which is taken in turn from a 1959 letter.

Wildcat has a rhetorical bluntness that makes it distinct from most contemporary dramas, even most indies. It’s a bluntness shared by Paul Schrader, whom Hawke famously worked with recently on First Reformed, and perhaps from whom Hawke even took a few artistic cues. Like a Schrader film, Wildcat is passionate, dead-serious, and uncompromising. It’s also not afraid to make subtext text, to pivot most scenes around extensive, probing dialogue, and to pepper in the occasional earnest artistic flourish that borders on corny.

As well, like a Paul Schrader film, Wildcat takes religious devotion seriously. It’s fascinated by Flannery O’Connor’s almost ascetic devotion to her Roman Catholicism, her obstinance in the face of modernity, her wrestling with the notion of grace, and her belief that her suffering brought her closer to that grace. Thus, it spends many scenes listening to her praying or arguing for her religion, letting her wrestle with her demons in front of the camera.

The visual approach is hazy, washed out, overwhelmingly grey. The film seems to take place in a perpetual winter, with none of the vibrancy and growth that defines the South. Rather, any vibrancy is strangled, much like Flannery O’Connor’s own life was strangled by her illness. Only in its closing frames is anything resembling a burst of colour present on screen. The editing is scattered, jumping in time, weaving into stories and out. We’re never quite clear how old Flannery is supposed to be in a given scene, for instance.

As Flannery O’Connor, Maya Hawke is surprisingly good. She recites the writer’s text with fervor, allowing the recitation to be both a questioning and an affirmation of the statements she is making. She’s particularly adept at capturing the tortured indecision of the artist and the religious devotee, showing how Flannery O’Connor’s struggle with her faith was not due to a lack of faith, but rather an indecision over how to incorporate it into the modern world.

As her mother, Laura Linney is not as impressive. Linney is a performer who has always struggled to seem credible on screen, as if she’s a bit too worried that the viewer is not taking her seriously such that she dials up the performance by a half notch too much. Hawke uses this quality to the film’s benefit in certain moments, when Regina O’Connor’s inauthenticity aggravates Flannery to no end. But you sometimes wish the credibility of the performance was up to the credibility of Flannery O’Connor’s writing.

Wildcat is not a movie many people will enjoy. Those viewers who will be able to attune to the wavelength of its biographical storytelling may struggle with its earnest religiosity, while those who are intrigued by the serious religious inquiries may be thrown off by the scattershot narrative and use of vignettes. Thus, perhaps Wildcat is a fitting depiction of Flannery O’Connor, a writer who never found a home in the world during her life, and whose writing only became adored after her death when fellow outcasts recognized its genius. It’s unlikely Wildcat will become adored down the line to the level of O’Connor’s writing, but it’s a film that is serious about art, which is something of a rarity in contemporary cinema.

7 out of 10

Wildcat (2023, USA)

Directed by Ethan Hawke; written by Ethan Hawke and Shelby Gaines; starring Maya Hawke, Laura Linney, Philip Ettinger, Rafael Casal, Cooper Hoffman, Steve Zahn, Vincent D’Onofrio, Alessandro Nivola, Willa Fitzgerald.

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