Finding Flannery: An evening with Wildcat, Ethan Hawke, and questions

The young man in the seat next to me at the Angelika Film Center in New York City turned to his friend a few minutes before Wildcat began. “So, what’s this movie about?” he asked.

What, indeed. For Wildcat isn’t your traditional biopic. Yes, it’s about Flannery O’Connor, but more generally, it’s about creativity and the role of art in life, and more specifically, the life of faith.

Director Ethan Hawke was present after that recent screening for a question-and-answer session with a reporter from Indiewire. (He is doing several of these sessions around the country this month – check the film’s website for locations)

In the conversation, he explained the origins of the film. His interest in O’Connor, he said, goes back to his childhood. His family lived in Georgia for his time and his mother, a textbook saleswoman, was an O’Connor aficionado, planting the seed.

Decades later, Hawke’s daughter Maya discovered O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal while she was in high school and felt seen, as we say.

A Prayer Journal, published in 2013, is just what it says: journal entries addressed to God written when O’Connor was a student at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. The appeal of the journal to Maya was Flannery’s frankly articulated search for a spiritual grounding for her creativity. She knew she had a talent, she felt the call to use it, but also wanted to make sure that God was the beginning and end of her efforts. In other words, the Christian call is to humility, but the creation of great art demands boldness and sense of confidence that might be perceived to be in tension with that. Or, on the other hand, is the emptying of self of an artist perfectly in tune with the Christian ideal of oneself as nothing?

How to balance the creative drive and the love of God?

But I do not mean to be clever although I do mean to be clever on 2nd thought and like to be clever & want to be considered so. (A Prayer Journal)

Maya Hawke was so taken with A Prayer Journal that she adapted a portion of it to use as a monologue for entrance into Juilliard. She ended up dropping out of Juilliard, but didn’t forget Flannery. Over the course of the past few years, as she found success in roles in the television series Stranger Things and films including Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, she pursued and obtained film rights for some of O’Connor’s work and eventually approached her father with the idea of making a movie.

As Ethan Hawke related after the screening, his daughter came to him with the idea at a time when he had been rethinking matters of faith and creativity himself. He’d been musing, he said, about why questions of faith and meaning that had absorbed him as a young man had dropped away in recent years, and wondering again, as well, what the purpose of the creative life was at all.

And so a collaboration was born, filmed in the winter of 2023 in northern Kentucky. Asked at a video press conference for Catholic journalists why they didn’t film in Atlanta, Hawke’s quick answer was that Marvel Studios has taken over film production in the Atlanta area and there’s no crew left to work on anything else. In addition, there was no chance of actually filming at Andalusia, Flannery’s home, and the state of Kentucky offered incentives to bring the production there.

(A Catholic priest, Father Matthew Hardesty, served as an advisor to the film when it filmed in his parish in New Hope, Kentucky, and can be briefly seen as a priest celebrating Mass. His experience with the crew is related here. Another bit of filming trivia: this writer’s daughter, who lives in Kentucky, sold a vintage typewriter to the film’s prop department from her online store. At the time, all she knew was that it was called “Wildcat” and Ethan Hawke had something to do with it. We assumed the movie was about college sports!)

So, to answer that young man’s question: What is Wildcat about?

It’s obviously about Flannery O’Connor, as Ethan Hawke said, with the hope of introducing this brilliant writer to a broader, new audience. In the online press conference, he recounted that, at a recent screening in Lexington, Kentucky, young women had showed up, drawn to the film mostly because of Maya Hawke’s involvement, but carrying with them, volumes of O’Connor’s stories. He was hopeful about the potential for a new, younger audience for this writer who, as he put it, gave the impression of being somewhat like Emily Dickinson but “wrote like Charles Bukowski.”

So yes, Flannery O’Connor for her own sake, but also for the sake of exploring those issues related to creativity: What is the source of our art? How do we process life as we create? What is the role of art in human life and more particularly in the life of faith? Is it possible to be a great, authentic artist and a good, faithful Christian? How do we best serve God through our art?

In that sense, Wildcat is an intriguing project because it’s clearly a personal one for the Hawkes. There’s an authenticity to the questions that are being asked onscreen and passion in the answers that is rare to see in film these days.

So how did they do?

Wildcat is an intriguing film and worth seeing. Flannery is recognizable, real, and the depiction is faithful to what we can understand about her–to a point. And while it certainly might–and I hope, will–introduce Flannery to a new audience, I can’t characterize it as a good introduction to her work, or even her life. In short, it does no violence to her, but crucial dots are left unconnected.

There’s much that’s good here. The film centers on one year of Flannery’s life, the period in which she had finished up at Iowa, was trying to see Wise Blood to publication and was diagnosed with the lupus that would eventually kill her at the age of 39. Much of the script, as Ethan Hawke said, was “curated” from Flannery’s letters and A Prayer Journal, grounding the film firmly in Flannery’s accounting of her inner life. Maya Hawke’s performance is marvelous, perhaps even award-worthy, expressing Flannery’s curiosity, openness, steeliness and yes, suffering.

Wildcat, however, is more than a biopic, for, as I said, creativity is the focus. To that end, Hawke weaves scenes from Flannery’s life in Iowa, New York and then, eventually, Georgia, with scenes from several of her stories: “The Comforts of Home,” “Revelation,” “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” “Parker’s Back” and “Good Country People.” The intention is to have the stories and the life shed light on one another and to explore, in some way, how this reserved young woman produced, for example, a story about a man who gets a tattoo of Jesus on his back and is beaten by his enraged wife for his efforts.

It doesn’t quite work, unfortunately. The dramatizations all feature Maya Hawke and Laura Linney–who plays Regina, Flannery’s mother–in crucial roles, roles of fictional characters that “fit” their living characters. So Linney plays the racist, self-satisfied Ruby Turpin in “Revelation,” and Maya Hawke plays Mary Grace, the arrogant college student who heaves her Human Psychology textbook at Ruby in the doctor’s waiting room and calls her “an old warthog from Hell.” And so on.

Now, no one can deny, having read O’Connor’s story and correspondence and knowing even a bit about her life, that her characters and the landscape in which they breathe are rooted in life. That, of course, was O’Connor’s sense of fiction writing: that it must be rooted in reality, because it must be true–even if it’s fiction. “I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality,” she wrote in an essay. “It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.”

And yes, the reader recognizes Flannery’s fellow townspeople and family members in the “good country people” of her stories and even recognizes Flannery herself (she would admit) in the imperious young intellectuals who sneer at them.

But dramatizing the stories in this way, casting Hawke and Linney in these roles, results in a reductive impression of what Flannery was about in her work, an impression that is only deepened by the personal struggles Wildcat centers.

Although Wildcat give ample space to Flannery’s own words about her inner life, one is left, at the end, with the sense that her ultimate victory in her creative struggles was about reconciling the “scandalous” nature of her literary vision with her faith, accepting her illness and seeing it as an opportunity rather than a prison, and settling into a life of making art out of what she sees.

Which is…not wrong. But also not completely correct, and the difficulty lies in the definition of that last phrase–what was it that she sees?

Wildcat leaves us, ultimately, with the implication that what O’Connor saw was what we all see on the surface: the weird, tragic, absurd ways of human beings in the world and with each other, and that was her subject. But she saw so much more than that:

I don’t really think the standard of judgment, the missing link, you spoke of that you find in my stories emerges from any religion but Christianity, because it concerns specifically Christ and the Incarnation, the fact that there has been a unique intervention in history. It’s not a matter in these stories of Do Unto Others. That can be found in any ethical cultural series. It is the fact of the Word made flesh. (The Habit of Being)

To be sure, Flannery was adamant that the novelist was not an evangelizer; those who confused the roles wrote the worst fiction, she would not hesitate to say. But the fiction writer communicates what she sees and what Flannery saw on Georgia farms, Atlanta buses, and Tennessee backwoods was human beings who’d be created by God, loved by God, made for life with God–resisting God at every turn. And, therefore, needing to be opened up to grace, violently, if need be.

“She would’ve been a good woman,” said The Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” (“A Good Man is Hard to Find”)

And what closes us to that grace? Pride, the root of all of the deadly sins. O’Connor’s protagonists are driven by pride–not just the “good country people,” but the young tyros throwing books and drinking unpasteurized milk–everyone is ridiculous, proud and closed–until the suffering comes.

And even though we hear, in voiceover, Flannery’s prayer to “Please help me to get down under things and find where You are,” the way that the stories are dramatized doesn’t, with perhaps the exception of “Parker’s Back,” help us actually see the way Flannery saw–in its totality.

There’s also, it seems to me, another set of dots that go unconnected, although the dots are certainly there. Wildcat invites us on Flannery’s journey of acceptance of her illness, her probably early death, her life in rural Georgia. That acceptance is the key to her flourishing, we are left to understand. The missing piece here, though is a spiritual one as well. Flannery’s stories bring characters to that same point—it is only through the suffering that they might, at the end, be open to God’s presence. It’s probably too much for a film, but an observant viewer might be moved to consider: what Flannery saw, in a deep sense, and wrote about, was what she experienced, and that’s more than local odd characters scratching a living out of Georgia red dirt: it’s God in the brokenness, it’s grace in the pain.

In his New York appearance, Ethan Hawke observed that O’Connor’s stories are hard to understand and can even be “upsetting” to read. “You don’t know what they’re about,” he said, but then continued with an intriguing and astute way of explaining the deeper experience of O’Connor. Her writing, he said, can’t help but strike you as “mathematically correct.” That is to say, there is a rightness about her vision that is clear, but is also hard to get to and challenging to explain.

It’s a vision that’s also difficult to translate onto film, despite the best of (very admirable!) intentions and tremendous skills, no doubt. And perhaps not only difficult, but impossible, for as Flannery herself wrote:

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.

“So what’s this movie about?”

Perhaps it’s mostly about that, then, after all: read the story.