Ethan Hawke directs his daughter Maya in a film that mixes the author’s reality with her fictional creations. He will be in Boston for post-screening discussions on Thursday and Friday at the Coolidge.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Director and co-writer Ethan Hawke’s film “Wildcat” features Hawke’s daughter Maya Hawke (“Stranger Things”) as Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor. The film examines the blurry line between O’Connor’s short, tragic real life and the offbeat, sometimes violent, often grotesque fictional worlds she creates. “Fiction,” O’Connor reminds us, “is not make-believe, but a plunge into reality.” Reality for O’Connor includes her devout Catholicism and the autoimmune disease that killed her father and afflicts her and will take her life at age 39. Mary Flannery, as she is addressed by her family, lives with her protective, for the most part, supportive mother, Regina (Laura Linney), who also makes appearances in her fiction as a variety of maternal figures. These scenes feature Linney in different costumes and make-up. Hawke’s O’Connor herself also appears in recreations of Flannery’s work. For example, in an early scene, O’Connor appears as Star Drake, the”hot-check-passing nymphomaniac” of O’Connor’s 1965 short story “The Comforts of Home.”The story is presented to us as “coming attractions” for a film. The action then morphs into bits from O’Connor’s iconic 1953 story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” featuring a murdered family and a serial-killing convict named The Misfit.
Lately, questions have been raised about whether or not O’Connor was a racist. Hawke and the film appear to argue that she was not, only brutally honest. When advised by a fellow writer to change the n-words in her work to the word “negro,” O’Connor erupts at the idea of sugar-coating “the truth” (which truth she is referring to is left for us to ponder).
“Wildcat” is an admirable attempt to celebrate one of America’s most important and distinctive authors, who might collectively be called the children of William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (with a tip of the hat to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”). But the film, which was co-written by musician Shelby Gaines, never catches fire. It does, however, occasionally emit smoke.
In an early scene, the actor Alessandro Nivola (“The Many Saints of Newark”) appears as a crass New York City literary agent who suggests O’Connor produce an outline for her work-in-progress “Wise Blood” if she expects an advance. The action shifts to scenes from O’Connor’s story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” with actor Steve Zhan playing a one-armed tramp, Linney as the largely toothless mother of a deaf-mute daughter, and Hawke as the daughter Lucynell. At times, O’Connor’s work comes across as eccentric Southerners asking each other religious or philosophical questions.
Irish-Catholic O’Connor struggles with her religion, art, health, and dead-on-arrival relationship with Boston Brahmin Robert “Cal” Lowell (Philip Ettinger), a fellow member of the artists’ community at Yaddo. Regina believes that her daughter’s stories are “cute” but exhorts her to write another “Gone with the Wind” if she knows what’s good for her.
Mary Turpin (Linney), a farm-owning character O’Connor creates in her final story “Revelation,” thanks Jesus for not being “Black” or “white trash.” O’Connor believes that creativity is “God inside us.” She later declares, “Faith is a cross, not an electric blanket.” Eventually, she adopts her father’s wooden crutches, another type of cross. In a flashback, we attend a party at Lowell’s residence, where partygoers upstairs might be having sex while those downstairs discuss “the Eucharist.” Out of the blue, Liam Neeson shows up as an unusually handsome Irish-Catholic priest tending to O’Connor. She asks him if he has read James Joyce (he hasn’t). Her life is a Stations of the Cross-like litany of cortisone shots and blood transfusions. She becomes engrossed in the semi-mystic Franz Kafka, a Jew.
In the lead role, Hawke, like many in the cast, is too affected and mannered. Films about writers such as “Capote” (2005), “Shirley” (2020), and “Naked Lunch” (1991) are much more balanced and insightful than this loosely-jointed, unevenly-acted, jumpy effort. “Wildcat” concludes with a long “quote” from O’Connor’s 1955 short story “Good Country People” with nepo-baby Cooper Hoffman of the overrated “Licorice Pizza” (2021) as a traveling salesman who steals the wooden leg of a young writer named, ahem, Joy Hopewell (Hawke). Cue “Amazing Grace.”
‘Wildcat’
Rating: Not rated. Sexually suggestive content, mature themes.
Cast: Maya Hawke, Laura Linney, Philip Ettinger
Director: Ethan Hawke
Writer: Shelby Gaines, Hawke
Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes
Where to Watch: “Wildcat” director Ethan Hawke and co-writer Shelby Gaines will attend the 7:30 p.m. showings on Thursday, May 23, and Friday, May 24 to participate in post-screening Q-and-As.
Grade: B
Boston Movie News 