"Wildcat" details Flannery O’Connor’s challenging life

Presenting a writer’s life in a captivating, engrossing way has eluded many directors. All the more credit, then, to Ethan Hawke who takes on prolific Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor in “Wildcat,” starring his daughter Maya. Not only does Ethan present Flannery’s physically and emotionally difficult life, he also integrates throughout the film dramatized vignettes from her semi-autobiographical short stories.  

Born in 1925, Savannah, Georgia, in her early twenties, O’Connor received a diagnosis of systemic lupus, an autoimmune disorder that took her life in 1965 at thirty-nine. “Wildcat” presents Flannery reacting to negative reception at the Iowa Writer’s workshop, struggling with rejection by her Rinehart editor-in-chief, enjoying support from friend Robert “Cal” Lowell, and contending with an embattled relationship with her mother, Regina, on whose farm she lives due to her medical problems.

Working from letters and journals (with O’Connor’s racism a recent topic in the media), Hawke brings this devout but irreverent Catholic to vivid life. A tormented skeptic, Flannery depicted unsettling and often unpopular topics: primarily nihilism and religious skepticism intermixed with dark humor often connected with tragically flawed, exploitive, physically compromised individuals: a one-armed tramp, a young woman with a partial leg prosthesis, a heavily tattooed drifter, a smooth-talking, victimizing Bible salesman.    

At a Q&A with Ethan Hawke at this past year’s Telluride Film Festival where I first saw the film, he made clear his trepidation undertaking such a daunting challenge. But, with Maya’s encouragement, he and Shelby Gaines developed the screenplay collapsing real events O’Connor transformed in her stories. The result is a dynamic interplay between the real and the imagined. In fact, Hawke says, “’Wildcat’ is a movie about imagination and faith” defined by Flannery’s “inner life, by her search and her dialogue with the divine.”  

Maya Hawke is Flannery and Laura Linney her mother Regina, but both play six roles (the actual and invented) inviting rich insights into both Flannery’s creativity and her troubled existence. Steve Zahn, Vincent D’Onofrio, Liam Neeson, Philip Ettinger, and Willa Fitzgerald shine in supporting roles. The widescreen compositions masterfully deliver an artist’s riveting, unsettled world.  “Wildcat” is available now. Check listings.