Flannery O’Connor warned that “there won’t be any biographies of me because … lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make for exciting copy.” The challenge, then, for Ethan and Maya Hawke in creating a biopic about O’Connor was to decide whether to focus on her life or her work. They decided to do both, with modest, but limited, success, combining a mundane life with grotesque stories. Together they agreed that the story of her life should be interwoven with, as Maya put it, a “kaleidoscope” of her stories. 

But how does one organize a kaleidoscope? The Hawkes employ an inventive format, which is at times aesthetically attractive, even if they squeeze too many stories—six—onto the screen, so that most of the truncated tales become quizzical teasers as much as satisfying summaries.

“Wildcat,” the name of the film, is an early short story by Flannery O’Connor and is one of the six stories used as her Master of Fine Arts thesis, “The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories at the University of Iowa. It was posthumously published in the 1970 North American Review and in 1971 appeared in the Library of America’s Flannery O’Connor. Elements of “Wildcat” were also integrated into “Judgment Day,” the last short story in O’Connor’s second collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge, also published posthumously. 

That Ethan Hawke, as the director, and Maya Hawke, as the lead actress, would choose the short story title for their movie “Wildcat” (2023) indicates that the father-daughter duo is, as they claim, O’Connor aficionados, both for her art, and her spirituality. In an interview, Maya Hawke added that the title is fitting given there was a certain ferocity about O’Connor’s writing and her faith. The screenplay is written by Ethan Hawke and Shelby Gaines, the accomplished screenwriter, musician, and composer. The elder Hawke shares that as a young man, his parents introduced him not only to O’Connor but also to Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day, all of whom, Hawke explains, provided him with a kind of spiritual nourishment.

Wildcat is the most recent in a short list of O’Connor adaptations. Those include John Huston’s unexceptional 1979 adaptation of O’Connor’s first novel Wise Blood. Interpretations of O’Connor’s short stories include the misguided The Life You Save (1957), drawn from “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” in which the story’s handicapped grifter is played by none other than Gene Kelly. The film, in an act of cinematic sacrilege, is rewritten with a happy ending. At least Kelly does not dance. Better is the Displaced Person (1977), from one of O’Connor’s most brilliant short stories of the same name. The film includes a young Samuel L. Jackson as the farmhand, “Sulk.”

Wildcat, then, alternates between various scenes of O’Connor’s adult life, some shot in her farmstead, Andalusia, and condensed enactments of a half dozen of her short stories; namely, “The Comforts of Home,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Parker’s Back,” “Revelation,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” and “Good Country People.” Maya Hawke is a talented actress, and for the most part, she portrays the various roles she inhabits well. Including the role of Flannery O’Connor herself, Hawke must inhabit six other literary characters, one of them a young man in “Everything That Rises.” One might be forgiven for suspecting that Ethan Hawke had in mind a showcase for his daughter.

Laura Linney plays Regina, Flannery’s mother, as well as prominent roles in the short stories. Liam Nielson makes a cameo appearance as a visiting priest, a role borrowed from the colorful “Father Flynn” in O’Connor’s short story, “The Enduring Chill.”

Those who are O’Connor aficionados, if not scholars, will have a decided advantage viewing Wildcat. Others will be intrigued to read more. Yet others will shake the dust off their feet as they leave perplexed. Maya Hawke admitted, perhaps in an over-statement, that Wildcat is “a very weird movie, and it’s really only for people who have crazy brains and really artistic minds and weird dreams.” That’s quite a skill set. In interviews, the Hawkes seem well aware of the central element of “grace” in O’Connor’s stories; whether they were able to consistently represent it into the film is another question.

The movie begins with “The Comforts of Home,” fashioned as a noir crime story and presented as if it were a preview of a coming attraction. It’s an intriguing mechanism by which to start the film, but many viewers will not recognize that the Hawkes are making a brief nod to an O’Connor short story. Then, with O’Connor/Maya Hawke as narrator, the movie highlights one of the most stirring passages in all of O’Connor’s literature, found in the first paragraph of the third chapter of her novel, Wise Blood. It adroitly depicts the eternal and purposeful nature of the universe in contrast with human indifference:

The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying any attention to the sky. 

In a story such as this one, it is assumed that a certain amount of literary license is granted. Much of O’Connor’s dialogue is a mélange of judiciously chosen quotes from her correspondence (e.g., The Habit of Being), her graduate school diary (A Prayer Journal), and her collected essays (Mystery and Manners), as well as her short stories and her first novel. Those passages display O’Connor’s wit, intelligence, and iconoclasm.

Hawke and Gaines take further license when they adeptly create a new scene in the portrayal of “Revelation.” This is perhaps O’Connor’s most accessible short story, and it is handled deftly. Drawing on a repeating theme in the story, Hawke fashions a kitschy Jesus to confront a vain and condescending Mrs. Turpin. It works, and it is O’Connor-esque enough to suppose the author would be pleased, or at least bemused. It also offers the best view of O’Connor’s all-important phenomenon of grace. 

The Hawkes, though, take literary license beyond its proper limits with their portrayal of O’Connor as a tortured soul, rather than an intense, pious, and driven writer. This narrative is pursued in ways large and small. Most prominent is Maya Hawke’s consistent over-acting of O’Connor as a habitually emotionally distraught young woman. The Hawkes also fabricate a romantic interest in the person of American poet Robert “Cal” Lowell, whom she first met as a graduate student at the Creative Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa when he was invited to read his poetry to the class. Nothing more than a friendship developed between O’Connor and Lowell and almost all of O’Connor’s later letters to Lowell are addressed both to him and also to his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. O’Connor may have had a mild but undeveloped romantic interest with Erik Langkjaer, an academic book salesman, but that would have required the unnecessary introduction of a marginal character into the movie. 

It’s not that O’Connor might not have engaged in a relationship, if not marriage, but that would have required an alternate life: Through her time at Georgia State College for Women and then graduate school in Iowa, O’Connor was intensively focused on what she perceived as not only her vocation, but also her spiritual calling. She was just gaining momentum when she was diagnosed with debilitating lupus in 1949, the disease that killed her father, Edward F. O’Connor. She lived fifteen more years, dying at an even earlier age, 39, than her father, who was 45.

Also problematic is the cinematic version of O’Connor’s close companionship with her mother, whom she called by her first name, Regina. In the film, Flannery and Regina have a strained, tense relationship—Regina searches for patience with O’Connor, a difficult full-grown child. Flannery and Regina, though, attended daily Mass at Sacred Heart Church in Milledgeville, Georgia, and the pair were frequently seen at lunch at the Sanford House Tea Room, a popular restaurant across from the courthouse in downtown Milledgeville. 

In the film, O’Connor’s room and study are illogically situated up a long flight of stairs in her house at Andalusia. Except that they aren’t. They were on the ground floor as any visitor to Andalusia can see; for that matter, it is evident on the Andalusia website. But requiring Flannery to try and navigate the stairs with her crutches adds to her pitiable portrait, especially when Ethan Hawke heartlessly has her fall from top to bottom. 

Her final fifteen years were devoted to writing, an almost superhuman challenge given her deteriorating health, and the palliative treatment that she called “worse than the disease.” In the film, Flannery/Maya injects steroids into her thigh wielding a frightening economy-size syringe, shots that O’Connor said “send you off in a rocket.” But self-pity was not in her nature. She wrote Lowell and Hardwick in 1953, 

I am making out fine in spite of any conflicting stories. … I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe more closely, or so I tell myself.

Elsewhere she added, “Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.” 

The Hawkes, unfortunately, tread the well-worn path in which Flannery is her stories and her stories are Flannery; and by casting Linney in multiple roles, the film suggests that every cynical middle-aged widow in O’Connor’s two short story anthologies is Regina, her mother. This is simplistic and such a distraction finds the reader occupying the surface of O’Connor’s fiction rather than plumbing its depth. I have never met any of Flannery’s contemporaries—and over the years I sought out as many of them as I could—who suggested that Regina was in the stories, nor O’Connor for that matter. On the contrary, the most frequent memories were of Flannery’s faith and friendships, while Regina was remembered for her loving care for Flannery, the support of her writing, and the close companionship between mother and daughter. 

O’Connor provides the best response to all of this when she chides Erik Lankjaer for supposing he was the inspiration for Manley Pointer, the sham Bible salesman in “Good Country People.” She explains to him her concept of “properties,” by which she means that she takes those elements of her experience and surroundings that lend authenticity to her fiction. Her characters are “Everyman,” in his fallen state, in need of grace and self-knowledge. That is also why O’Connor resisted those who tried to label her as a “regional writer” because that might narrow the universality of her work. She explains to Lankjaer,

I am highly taken with the thought of your seeing yourself as the Bible salesman. Dear boy, remove this delusion from your head at once. And if you think the story is also my spiritual autobiography, remove that one too. … Your contribution to it was largely in the matter of properties. Never let it be said I don’t make the most of experience and information no matter how meager. 

Intriguing is the final enactment of “Good Country People,” O’Connor’s most philosophic short story, an apt choice for a climactic ending to the film. The soundtrack behind the episode is artfully unsettling, as it should be, given the impending degradation of the protagonist. But the space allotted is inadequate to capture the nuance and depth of the story. One wishes there were more. This episode, and the portrayal of “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” in which the physically delicate Maya Hawkes plays a young man with her hair barely tucked under a hat, seem to be the actress’ least effective efforts.

O’Connor wrote to Betty Hester, “All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless, brutal, etc.” She supplemented this explanation when she said that her stories were about the “operation of grace in territory previously occupied by the devil.” As noted, the Hawkes seem to understand this, but the confines of the screen and the amalgam of stories intertwined with O’Connor’s mundane life don’t allow sufficient space for the development of grace. Granted, all of this is difficult to portray, and the Hawkes may have met the challenge as well as can be expected.