A good biopic is hard to find, but Wildcat artfully delivers

In the new movie Wildcat, a feverish and immobile Mary Flannery O’Connor, played by Maya Hawke, asks her parish priest, played by Liam Neeson, whether he has ever read James Joyce. He admits he has not, but he knows that Joyce is banned in Ireland. Relating to Joyce, but deeply committed to the faith he has rejected, Flannery emotes, “My writing’s scandalous! Can it still serve God?” In a rare cinematic achievement—a good biopic—director Ethan Hawke (Maya’s father) bears witness to the fulfillment of Flannery’s heartfelt hope. Moreover, Hawke and co-writer Shelby Gaines deliver another rarity: a truly humane Christian movie in the same vein as the gripping and gritty fiction of the film’s protagonist, who is still the undisputed queen of modern Catholic letters.

Wildcat’s inclusion of a Joyce reference in the pivotal moment when Flannery faces the devastating reality of her illness may be the key to the whole movie. Indeed, Hawke may also have given us a heuristic for better appreciating Flannery’s writing. For almost all her life, Flannery was forced to be the kind of person in a particular location with particular beliefs that Stephen Dedalus’s classmate Fleming describes him to be at the beginning of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Ireland is my nation. Clongowes is my dwelling place. And heaven is my expectation.” Wildcat is a portrait of the artist as a young woman—because a young woman is all Flannery ever was. Dying of complications of Lupus at just 39 years old, she never married and was denied the opportunity to break free of the small-town fetters of casual racism and inane country conversations.

But whereas Joyce left his home and reset his heavenly expectation, becoming something like a priest of the new literary religion, Flannery became the prophetess of Milledgeville—the anti-Margaret Mitchell for a world that never asked for such a person, but needed one badly. Joyce re-thought the old sacramental universe, and Flannery came to find her place firmly within it. She made peace with her suffering, she holed up in her family home, and she got a peacock.

As Wildcat demonstrates, the smallness of Flannery’s world is precisely what opened up her literary imagination. “Please help me get down under things where you are,” she prays successfully early in her career. And while the film shows us how Flannery’s illness was the primary factor in keeping her in Dixie under her mother’s care, there are signs in the film that any attempt to belong elsewhere would have resulted in an exile without the creativity Joyce had.

At one point in the film, a fellow writing student at the University of Iowa tells Flannery that she ought not to use “that word” in her stories. She replies defensively, “I prefer not to tidy up reality.” Likewise, the film depicts Flannery’s famous “if it’s just a symbol, to hell with it” quip taking place around a table full of her fellow graduate students. In the context of twentieth-century American literary society, her faith was an obvious intellectual handicap. Suffering among her kinfolk in Georgia, however, Flannery found opponents who were, surprisingly, a better match for her ferocity, offering a better opportunity for her to eschew comfort for greatness.

The film depicts Flannery’s routine of writing about what she sees in her small world, the scandals and indignities of which many of the people around her would rather not think about. In this world, her faith becomes a personal matter of life and death in contrast with the “poor man’s insurance policy” that she observes all around her. Wildcat implies that without Milledgeville, Flannery may never have become the typewriter for God that she was. And without a sometimes-fraught relationship with her mother, played by Laura Linney, Flannery may never have found the right canvas of personalities to populate her tales.

Here lies the genius of the story Ethan Hawke tells with the camera, interweaving an episodic plot about Flannery herself with depictions of some of her most famous stories. Maya Hawke, Linney, and other cast members play multiple roles, and in this way, the portrait of the artist is more complex: Flannery’s belligerent intellectualism plays out as the young woman who throws the book at the proud loudmouth (Linney) in the doctor’s office in “Revelation.” The fierce, independent Flannery who could not spread her wings because of illness expresses her agency in a reversal of care-taker roles in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” where again Hawke and Linney play mother and daughter. Same again for the film’s depiction of perhaps my very favorite of Flannery’s stories, “Good Country People,” which features a memorable performance by another Hollywood legacy actor, Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.

As I watched Wildcat, I thought about my own faith, my own origins, and indeed my own south-Georgia-born mother. My own copy of The Complete Stories sits next to me as I write this article, with an inscription in the inside cover that reads, “I love Flannery O’Connor and, of course, I love you! Mama, Christmas, 2016.” I was a latecomer to Flannery’s work, but thanks to my mother, I found her eventually; and I distinctly remember reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find” in my mother’s house in the fall of 2018, when I happened to be in Florida by myself, away from my wife and children for a few days. Incidentally, it was in the midst of my initial read-through of Flannery’s stories—which I had very wrongly assumed for too long had to be somewhat overrated—that I made my final decision to come into full communion with the Catholic Church.

In any case, adults who have to or choose to go home to Mama on occasion—or who choose to go home to the Church—may know the strange feeling of being where one belongs and where one is a complete stranger at the same time. Watching Wildcat, it occurred to me how this rootedness and transience defined Flannery; but also how, in a spiritual sense, this tension is the Christian life. As Chesterton once put it, the ideal Christian is always “homesick at home.”

Wildcat has some real artistic flourishes, including a beautiful long shot inside a tree-lined canopy in the “Good Country People” sequence. The film also opens up Flannery’s journal entries and letters through voiceover in the style best-exemplified in American cinema by Terrence Malick—a useful tool for telling a story whose power can only pour forth from the inner life of the protagonist. If voiceovers are used too rarely or too clumsily in cinema nowadays, it is because our movies are not contemplative enough, and too driven by plot and needless exposition. Wildcat gets it just about right.

And what Wildcat gets perfectly right is Maya Hawke’s performance. As already noted, it is more accurate to say performances, which display in turn the actress’ equal facility at tenderness, mania, innocence, guile, zeal, and languor. Hawke’s expression of Flannery’s sublimation of passions for her writing teacher, Cal Lowell, is beautifully sad. Maybe she is just the girl nobody wants, like poor Lucynell in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” Or maybe she is everything to God.

My particular favorite part of the movie is Hawke’s depiction of the wild young wife in “Parker’s Back,” where viewers may notice a striking resemblance to her real-life mother, Uma Thurman, in perhaps her most famous role as the Bride in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill series. I dare say, as much as I like Thurman in many movies, Hawke is on her way to becoming an even better performer.

Like Flannery’s writings in her time, Wildcat belongs to a small batch of ideal films we need more of in our time, but few people are asking for them or making them. Although Ethan Hawke is not Catholic, Catholics and other Christians ought particularly to perk up and pay attention to what he has done, eschewing niche-market faith-based movies that sing to the choir in order to make a few Christian bucks. As Flannery tells her snobby non-Christian friends in the film, the Gospel is “not an electric blanket.” And nor is art. As Pope Benedict XVI told artists in the Sistine Chapel in 2009, great art “gives man a healthy shock, it draws him out of himself, wrenches him away from resignation and from being content with the humdrum.” Flannery elaborates, “Truth doesn’t change according to your ability to stomach it.”

However, as the Canadian Catholic novelist Randy Boyagoda pointed out in his important 2013 article “Faith in Fiction”, Flannery may be a modern author admired by secular people and claimed by us religious ones; but also, she is long dead. (James Joyce is too!) Wildcat brings Flannery into our lives in a way no one else ever has; but where is Flannery’s successor, trying to wake us up? Likewise, we should be grateful that Ethan Hawke’s biopic gives us an example of much-needed earthy spirituality from yesterday. But what other filmmakers are poised to bring a new wave of metaphysical realism today, clearing the decks of both our exhausted Hollywood superheroes and our mediocre faith-based fiction?

To paraphrase Flannery in the film, we long for grace. Thankfully there is plenty of grace in Wildcat, which we must hope is a pledge of a renewal of soulful literature and cinema to come.

• Wildcat opens in limited release in the United States on May 3.