Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is back in Canada all week covering the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. We wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing coverage of TIFF 2023, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
An interesting quirk of the best movies about writing – be it fiction, memoir, or journalism – is that many are about so-called “recluses.” I’ll spare you platitudes about the solitary and isolated nature of putting pen to paper (and anybody who has ever taken a creative writing workshop knows that writers actually do love to talk, especially when it comes to trashing a competitor’s work), but these dramatizations key in on two important points as a result of being stripped of the narrative dynamism that comes with a medium that is, more often than not, inherently anti-cinematic. First, they dispel the myth of the writer-sage who hands down work from mountaintops and deliberately alienates those around them – representing basically every film about Emily Dickinson has covered how active her social life was and how deep her relationships were – and, second, they also emphasize how essential those surroundings are to the creative process, even if they’re glimpsed at a remove. These movies are about writing, not writers, which is a clear point of division from your average biopic.
Ethan Hawke’s Wildcat is a movie about writing. On paper, it seems like a sort of a stretch: It’s a dramatization of Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) and her descent into illness-induced isolation inside her family’s Georgia home. Hawke introduces his protagonist at a moment of vulnerability, in which she’s told off by a New York publisher who can’t seem to find the way into the samples she’s brought him from her novel Wise Blood, and though her retorts are fierce enough, she’s left with a sense of discomfort. A visit from an old writing professor from her time in Iowa – one whom she’s still in love with – before she boards a train back to Milledgeville. She knows that whatever illness is within her is boiling up, stuffing her cloth coat with newspapers, joints aching, butterfly rash slowly spreading across her face. She doesn’t know that it is one of the last times that she’ll venture out of the state. Lupus, the sickness that killed her father years before his prime, has come for her too. But she refuses to give up her writing, even if she grapples with its very nature.
See, Flannery’s talents are appreciated by the literati around the country in a semi-patronizing fashion – as she famously said, “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic” – and that distinction causes her to be placed at a remove with those around her. Her mother (Laura Linney) wishes she’d use her talents for beauty, and her aunt is vaguely repulsed by them, even if she’s too polite to outright say so. Yet she sees God in everything around her, being a staunch Roman Catholic (she even claims at one point that she doesn’t need a doctor – she needs a priest to cure what ails her), and her stories carry a fierce morality to them even as they depict unsavory things. It’s from this heady brew – old-time religion that’s older than the revival preachers, her family’s bicker and banter, the legacy of evil still rotting her surroundings, and her own cognizance of her mortality (and potential damnation) – that her work, as we know it, begins to take shape.
Hawke dramatizes several of her stories, including “Parker’s Back,” “Revelation,” “The Life You Save Might Be Your Own,” “Good Country People,” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” featuring a variety of guest appearances by performers like Steve Zahn, Rafael Casal, and Cooper Hoffmann, but it’s the Wizard of Oz-like recurrence of the actors playing real figures in O’Connor’s day-to-day life that make up the most interesting contributors. Linney, in particular, tends to represent the kind of Southern woman that O’Connor frequently took to task in her writing, with Hawke the Younger often taking on the role that the writer must have felt, in Hawke the Elder’s view, the most kinship with. The adaptations themselves are fine enough, but how they’re structured into the narrative of her isolation makes them appropriately potent. We see them in larval forms, drafts soon to be discarded and revised throughout her short career, growing in confidence and assertiveness as O’Connor herself becomes more assured in her surroundings.
This is a window into Hawke’s perspective on O’Connor and his portrayal of her, which is awed by her talent as well as her resilience without straying too far into the realm of hagiography. Hawke’s capacity for empathy is genuinely admirable, and Wildcat’s own narrative arc is formed by O’Connor’s embrace of an ethos similar to that of “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” to paraphrase the words of another Georgia icon, “Just because she can write a book doesn’t mean she should raise your kids.” All of the characters that seem initially to be one-note echoes of common southern stereotypes – the aunt and mother losing their minds over Gone With The Wind and saying to O’Connor that she needs to write like Margaret Mead is worthy of eye-rolling recognition from creative minds that emerged from below the Mason-Dixon – reveal themselves to be endlessly complex and emotive people, capable of great kindnesses and bitter cruelties in equal measure, much as O’Connor is herself. Hawke the Younger does a genuinely excellent job in this role, being full of a fire rooted in fierce self-advocacy, despair, and fear, channeled into her art in a way that she struggles to express in her day-to-day, emerging often enough in her dialogue as burst-fire eruptions of conviction and wit.
An outlaw romanticism is present here, as there was with Hawke’s last film, Blaze, but it’s wrapped in O’Connor’s fantastical fiction rather than in the biographical details, which has its own sort of withering sadness when contrasted, Singing Detective-style, with the mundanity of her surroundings. Her fiction aimed to get at the truth of that moment in Southern history, where the long arc of history finally began to bend towards justice, and the whole of the former Confederacy was dragged into the present, kicking and screaming. It’s important to note that O’Connor, especially in her self-insert capacity within Hawke’s dramatization of her stories, saw herself as a part of that world and not above it, with her perspective on the era’s primary agent of change, The Civil Rights Movement, representing one of her semi-Calvinist beliefs: Mankind is born damned, and we strive for salvation as much as we wallow in the sty of our own piggish indulgences. The criticism that O’Connor’s legacy endures today – mostly justified, as well, as her own racist beliefs often lay in conflict with the progressive morals of her storytelling – is as vividly withering as her own interrogations of her beliefs and of her righteousness were.
Wildcat is, ultimately, about the Sisyphean nature of the creative act: In the absence of the typical signifiers of recognition, one finds joy in their burden, with the craft itself being paramount. The debates we have about her work are wholly informed by her death: who knows what Flannery O’Connor would have done to tarnish or embellish her reputation had she lived another ten or twenty years? She was not timeless, yet her work is, rightly placed alongside Faulkner and other masters of Southern Literature as a means by which Southerners of all origins understand themselves. Despite everything she missed in her truncated and narrowed worldview, the stories remain potent, and the discomfort we feel when the person wielding the pen clashes with their published papers is valuable for any moral and intellectual growth.
Is it hypocrisy, or is it internal strife? All we will ever know are her contradictory words, left to the reader to parse their meaning. This is where Hawke and Wildcat, at large, make the distinction between writer and writing: He shows the process, the output, and the author in her (semi-glamorized) moment and allows us to be critical thinkers and readers, free to take and leave aspects at our discretion. It is a truly literary endeavor.