Review by Susanne Nielsen
Director Ethan Hawke co-wrote (with Shelby Gaine) and directed the 2023 film “Wildcat” starring Maya Hawke as Flannery O’Connor and Laura Linney as her mother Regina. In it he weaves the life of American iconic author and her poignant Gothic tales about rural life in her Native American South into an intense 105 minute tapestry of the surreal!
Hawke’s daughter Maya portrays O’Connor, the author of many short stories and a one novel that all have a decidedly dark side. From the opening scene we are in Flannery’s imagination, prickly typed tales in which we and she experience the protagonist’s every moment. The film has Hawke and Linney as her mother in a series of seamless episodes morph from real to fictitious characters playing out scenarios spun in O’Connor’s head!
A bride is carried over the threshold, a fearful girl cowering in her car, a man fascinated by a woman’s prosthetic leg, a mother who pays the ultimate price for a seeming good deed, and a woman sealing her daughter’s fate. Each segment offers a peek into O’Connor’s creative universe!
O’Connor is portrayed as a shy, awkward young woman in her 1950s college and social settings far from home. Already recognized as a promising American literary star by her professor, poet Robert Lowell (Philip Ettinger) who is in love with her intellect, O’Connor turns her unrequited love for him into the drama of her Gothic tales.
From the opening sequence of a B movie trailer, we find ourselves immersed in O’Connor’s fictitious world, never sure where life turns into fiction, characters or actions are real or imagined, and how intensely the drama will play out in the vast unforgiving landscape, excellently captured by Steve Cosens’ cinematography.
The film moves from snippets of Flannery’s obsessions, as she navigates life outside of her community to episodes set in her quirky Southern family. O’Connor’s mother becomes the towering figure – in a wide range from simplistic to elegant – the model for stories forming in the author’s head. As she communicates intensely with the publisher of her prize-winning first novel she resolutely insists to go it alone and quickly retreats back to her native South.
She leaves her professor and confidante with whom she shares her love of literature, to spend – as the film’s epitaph notes – her final 14 years in her room, dying of Lupus at the age of only 39. Her main form of contact, letters, excerpts read in Hawke’s voice, offer beautiful insights into this relationship beyond the mailbox she is able to physically reach.
A cameo by Liam Neesen shows the film’s view of O’Connor’s desire as devout Catholic to use her talent to achieve the ultimate – the desire for grace. We follow the author as she grapples with the growing discomfort of Lupus, the disease her father succumbed to too early in life. Under the protective watchful eyes of her mother, she endures its effects and painful treatment.
Thanks to the writing of Ethan Hawke, Maya Hawke as O’Connor, the always wonderful Laura Linney, and an excellent supporting cast, the film brings an important icon of American literary South, Flannery O’Connor, to life!
Additional Film Information:
Cast: Maya Hawke, Laura Linney
Directed and co-written by: Ethan Hawke
Genre: Biography, Drama
MPAA Rating: Not Rated
Running Time: 1 hr. 43 min.
Opening Date: Now Playing
Distributed by: Oscilloscope Labs HD
Released in: Prime Video