WILDCAT (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Wildcat, Oscilloscope Laboratories

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 16, 2024

How much of an author is in the writing? It's a question that has divided scholars and hounded writers, who are keen to confirm or deny that their writing says something about their lives in direct ways. With Wildcat, co-writer/director Ethan Hawke clearly believes the core of Flannery O'Connor, the Southern writer who never quite achieved the fame of her geographical contemporaries, can be found in the author's fiction. His movie is as much an anthology of filmed adaptations of O'Connor's short stories as it is a biography.

Even more than that, though, the two modes of storytelling exist side by side and often intermingled in this movie. Maya Hawke, the filmmaker's daughter, plays Flannery from her time as a graduate student in Iowa to her return to her Georgia hometown about five years later. It's not much of a span of time, but of course, the span of O'Connor's life was relatively brief.

She died in 1964, at the age of 39, and, after being diagnosed with lupus around the age of 27, spent the final 12 years of her life in seclusion. In some ways, then, her writing is the only element of drama to O'Connor's life, which would become one of limited routines following the events of the screenplay by Hawke and Shelby Gaines.

With that in mind, there's an inherent imbalance to this split narrative, which simply doesn't have much to do when it comes to dramatizing O'Connor's biography. Most of it revolves around three elements: her relationship with poet Robert "Cal" Lowell (Philip Ettinger), who spots Flannery's talent almost immediately upon meeting her and seems to have fallen in love with her by the time she returns home, and her strained relationship with her mother Regina (Laura Linney), who wants to protect her daughter from harsh realities and doesn't understand why Flannery's writing so regularly reflects them, and her religious beliefs. O'Connor was Catholic, and much of the third act of the movie's biographical narrative is devoted to Flannery wrestling with her faith in the face of her diagnosis.

The spiritual doubts, though, also exist against the thoughts that lead her toward writing about the darkness within people—especially Southern white folks, fighting against the inevitable tide of the civil rights movement with overt racism or by hiding their prejudice beneath a transparent veil of politeness. There's a debate as to whether or not O'Connor herself was personally as racist as some of her characters, despite her fiction so clearly finding the absurdity and insecurity of such beliefs, but since this movie is more about the writing than the person, that controversy is nowhere to be found here.

Doesn't that reflect the inherent limitations of this approach to dissecting authors through their work? There's no room for doubts or questions, really, because the certainty of the answers in such a reading of a writer exists exclusively in the writing. In his own writing and staging of O'Connor's life, Hawke accentuates that notion, too.

We're not just watching Flannery consider, type, and edit her short stories. We're also watching Hawke, the actor, appear as certain characters—usually the most sympathetically wise or vulnerable ones—within the dramatizations of those stories. In doing so, the filmmaker gives us the answers to questions his movie barely ponders about the central character. Flannery is mostly defined by these upstanding characters, just as her mother is defined, since Linney also appears in the adaptation sections, by a string of supposedly proper Southern ladies who can't help but be judgmental in a multitude of ways, often in terms of race.

The problem here isn't necessarily that the movie tells us what to think about its subject. That's the case with most biographies, especially cinematic ones, which have to reduce the scope of an individual and that person's life to a comprehensible narrative. It's that this movie primarily tells us about O'Connor by way of her fiction, because the story's Flannery is intentionally set up to only feel able to express herself through her writing. As a character, Flannery feels like a non-entity, despite Hawke's reserved but passionate performance as the author, who finds herself suddenly in the midst of more physical, psychological, and spiritual struggles than she thinks capable of bearing.

A movie about the character suggested by this performance could have been intriguing, but Hawke, the filmmaker, clearly wants to bring attention to O'Connor's fiction, as well. The adaptations of selections from the author's short stories are certainly effective on their own, but again, they're not simply that within the context of the movie. The stories are also carrying the weight of trying to figure out who Flannery is, so it's difficult to appreciate the adaptations on their own merit.

Either approach—a straightforward biography or an anthology movie—might have functioned as an independent project, but their blending in Wildcat undercuts both modes. We're not actually learning O'Connor's story, and neither are we watching O'Connor's stories. In merging the two ideas, the movie keeps both at a removed distance.

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