Out of all the people who had good 2023s, Maya Hawke might be the most forgotten-about. She played thankless parts in two swell features — Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro — and did so beautifully, in ways that complimented the work of her co-stars (and when you’ve got Cooper chewing up celluloid, you know that’s a hard task). But the real jewel of her work, Wildcat, a Flannery O’Connor biopic directed by her father Ethan, was only seen at festivals last year. We saw it back in September in Toronto, and we were blown away by it — and, thankfully, you’ll get a chance to see the full thing pretty soon. But here’s a first look at it, thanks to Oscilliscope Laboratories (the bane of film writers everywhere), who dropped a trailer for the film earlier on Wednesday. It’s real swell.
Take a look:
In lieu of a traditional synopsis, here’s the blurb from the 2023 TIFF program. As always, you could just read our review, and you should, but this is a solid little-write-up:
“Ethan Hawke explores the life and art of American author Flannery O’Connor — played by his own daughter, Maya Hawke — in his latest interrogation of the artist’s way. There’s always something intriguing rustling around in the projects Ethan Hawke chooses to direct, as anyone who saw his documentary ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ (TIFF ’14) can attest. After ‘Blaze’ and his recent documentary series about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Hawke’s latest exploration of the artist’s way focusses on a key period in the life of Flannery O’Connor, imagining the young writer as she perfects her process, committing to her unique and deeply personal fiction at the cost of her own comfort and contentment.
The O’Connor story allows Hawke to play with both text and texture, using the device of having his protagonist insert her own family into her fiction in a movie where he’s cast his daughter Maya Hawke as that protagonist. And, of course, he’s made a movie about a writer’s process that spends little time on the actual labour of writing, because he knows the end result is the thing that matters. The thing that lasts.
Maya Hawke finds something similarly compelling in O’Connor’s skin, wrestling with the author’s bred-in-the-bone Catholicism and her enigmatic decision to abandon earthly temptations to embrace an ascetic life. The film feels like Ethan Hawke’s response to making Paul Schrader’s ‘First Reformed’, with its tormented protagonist struggling to understand God’s purpose. He even casts his co-star Philip Ettinger in a small but pivotal role here, alongside Laura Linney, Steve Zahn, Alessandro Nivola, and Cooper Hoffman. The result is an ambitious, aching inquiry into creation and sustenance from one of America’s most consistently enthralling talents.”
Wildcat will hit select theaters on May 3, with a wider release soon to follow.