Flannery’s life of faith, grit and grace

Wildcat

Directed by Ethan Hawke
Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2024.

Wildcat is the story of a fiercely devout artist who seeks to honour God through her art amid physical suffering and other challenges. Flannery O’Connor, who died in 1964 at age 39, is primarily known for short stories often classified as “Southern Gothic.” Some readers may hesitate to identify with her flawed characters, but they speak to the imperfections present in every person. Ethan Hawke, who co-wrote and directed Wildcat, weaves some of O’Connor’s more well-known stories into the main biographical narrative of her life.

Hawke highlights the intimate relationship between O’Connor’s life and art by using the same actors who play O’Connor and her mother to also play her short story characters. Maya Hawke (Ethan’s daughter) is O’Connor and Laura Linney is her mother. This overlap was only distracting for me during the early scenes depicting O’Connor’s story “The Comforts of Home,” which came across as a racy black-and-white preview that was at odds with the tone of the rest of the film.

A main struggle for O’Connor is reconciling her desire for recognition with a strong desire to serve God through her artistic gifts. In a pivotal scene where she is ill and visited by a priest (a perfectly cast Liam Neeson), she asks, “My stories are scandalous, can they still serve God?” She longs to honour God with her gifts but she doesn’t know how to reconcile this with her desire to be respected for her talent. She wrestles with her pride while trapped both in a place she doesn’t want to live and in a body that is ravaged by Lupus – the disease that took her father’s life and ultimately takes her own. She buys a peacock as a source of comfort and the bird becomes a beloved animal as well as a symbol in her work.

O’Connor’s physical ailments shape her perspective on the relationship between grace and struggle. During the previously mentioned conversation with her priest, she laments how the Christians around her seem to want to deny the presence of suffering in a life of faith. The visual of her laboured journey up the stairs of her mother’s house to her writing room serves as a symbol of such tension.

A jarring vision

O’Connor uses her stories to passionately and uncompromisingly seek out truth and convey reality. Wildcat opens with this quote about O’Connor’s philosophy of literature: “I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.” People ask her why she doesn’t write “stories people would actually want to read.” Still, she refuses to give up her jarring vision.

Many biographical films seek to lionize their subjects. Hawke, however, refreshingly allows O’Connor to be awkward, contrary, uncooperative and prickly. An editor working on her first novel states, “You seem to want to stick pins in your readers.” But she is seeking catharsis and discovery with her writing, not escape.

O’Connor’s attitude towards race is another uncomfortable aspect of her character – one that the film somewhat subtly acknowledges. Her published letters reveal a casual racism common in the American South at the time she lived. The film has a character warn her not to use “that word” – suggesting the “n-word.” To this, O’Connor’s character retorts that she only wants to show the world “as it is.” Wildcat also gives a nuanced example of how O’Connor addressed race formally in her writing in its portrayal of her story “Everything that Rises Must Converge.”

Wildcat is a portrait of a writer who achieves her goals of seeking out truth and serving God through her art – on her terms. While grappling with the limitations of illness and societal expectations, she creates striking fiction that enables her to spread her unique feathers and shine.