Film Review | Grotesque Saintly Verses

Flannery O’Connor created such a vibrant rogues gallery of characters and tales both real and surreal, “grotesque” and mundane, we would expect there to be more traction on the cinematic adaptation front. And yet, apart from the brilliant John Huston–directed Wise Blood (1979), the so-called “Southern Grotesque” master has rarely been given any proper screen time. 

Until now. We can thank the Hawke family for paying due respects to O’Connor’s work, legacy, life and the integrated twain there-between in the deep and inventive Wildcat. As the film’s backstory goes, it was promising young actress Maya Hawke who, armed with her passion for O’Connor, convinced her celebrated actor and sometimes director father Ethan — also an O’Connor acolyte — to plunge into the project. (Vis-à-vis the gnawing spiritual crises of the devoutly Catholic O’Connor, Ethan himself played a tortured Christian character in Paul Schrader’s tour de force First Reformed.)

Voilà, a beautiful father/daughter project came together, he the director and co-writer and she, playing the role of the Great Southern author in the turbulent early days of her career and discovery of her life-threatening lupus, which she dubbed “the French wolf.” 

Among the obstacles in the process of bringing O’Connor’s unique writing to the screen is the fact that the lion’s share of her finished writing was in the short story form. Another challenging factor is that her unflinching and dryly satirical style involves the kind of moral complexities that would frighten off mainstream movie-making sensibilities.

Neither of these were obstacles for the Hawkes, who imaginatively stitched together a tapestry moving across chronological time in O’Connor’s life — from her time in NYC, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her housebound phase back in Milledgeville, Georgia — while also interweaving biographical scenes with dramatic adaptations of several O’Connor stories. Often, the same actors inhabit both “real” and fictional vignettes, accentuating the direct influence of the writer and the life she absorbed and poeticized in her writing. The tactic also allows Maya Hawke and Laura Linney to demonstrate their wowing, chameleonic acting range by playing multiple characters under the roof of one film.

Huston’s Wise Blood was my own catalyst for discovering the great American “wildcat” O’Connor, and I subsequently read all her fiction, though not her other substantial and highly personal A Prayer Journal. That source is reportedly a central feature of the Wildcat script, which doesn’t skimp on the author’s inward ruminations and appeals to God. She is portrayed as a deep thinker and religious devotee for whom angst and questioning faith is central to the life in faith. 

“I try to turn the other cheek,” she says early in the film, “but my tongue is always in it.” To her agnostic/atheistic comrades in Iowa, she insists “people think religion is a big electric blanket, when really it is the cross.” In the full throes of lupus, with crutches and jumbo hypodermic needles in her daily life, she breaks down before a pastor (a suitably stoic Liam Neeson) and notes that in seeking God’s grace, “the deeper you go, the more you suffer … maybe God finds us in the darkness.”

Despite the necessary dark elements of Wildcat, there are plenty of spicier pleasures in the earthy headiness of the story segments and, for instance, in one plainly happy moment for O’Connor — when a crate full of her beloved peacocks arrive at the local train station.

For a quick biographical fix on O’Connor’s storied and pained life, we can check out the 2020 doc Flannery. But the film is far too glib and even weirdly cheerful, to a Disney-fied degree. What it lacks is the quality of brutal honesty and Brueghel-esque human folly linked to another comment O’Connor makes with Iowan classmates: “I prefer not to tidy up reality. The truth doesn’t change according to your ability to stomach it.”

Wildcat stomachs it beautifully.