{"id":11003,"date":"2024-06-13T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-13T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11003"},"modified":"2026-01-04T13:22:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T18:22:10","slug":"weekend-movie-pick-wildcat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11003","title":{"rendered":"Weekend Movie Pick: Wildcat"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The award-winning author Flannery O\u2019Connor is something of an acquired taste. You may be familiar with her Southern Gothic stories, her preoccupation with religion, especially Roman Catholicism (she attended mass daily), her deep understanding of human nature and its propensity to darkness and violence, and her startling candor. She said, for example, \u201cThe truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.\u201d Lastly, we recall her suffering with the crippling autoimmune condition systemic lupus erythematosus, which took her father\u2019s life, and whose inevitable difficult progression she knew all too well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019Connor died at age 39. Now she comes blazing back to life in this bracing movie directed and co-written (with Shelby Gaines) by Ethan Hawke and starring his daughter, Maya Hawke, as O\u2019Connor and Laura Linney as her mother, Regina (trailer<\/a>), both of whom do brilliant work here. Flannery lived with her mother almost all of her life, and their relationship was obviously pivotal to the author\u2019s view of human nature and its shortcomings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019Connor never gave her stories\u2019 characters an easy way out, they never defaulted to a formulaic happy ending or an excess of sentimentality. What comes through in the stories is how strongly she rejected the shallow \u201cniceness\u201d of the people around her. Under her characters\u2019 good manners and professed propriety, she saw a core of racism and religious hypocrisy. Her own mother was the epitome of Southern graciousness and, naturally, did not understand Flannery\u2019s writing at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film weaves together scenes from O\u2019Connor\u2019s life and relationships with dramatized excerpts from her stories. (It helps probably to be somewhat familiar with the actual stories, but works, regardless.) Interestingly, the mostly awful male characters in these recreations are played by a succession of actors, whereas Hawke and Linney play the sparring (mostly) female characters. They approach each of these fictional relationships fresh and without condescension. Relationships are complicated; you can love and despise a person at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Critic Jeffrey M. Anderson wrote, \u201cThis fine depiction of a great author avoids typical biopic trappings, instead concentrating on the rhythms of the artistic process and capturing O\u2019Connor\u2019s voice in a visual way.\u201d Some critics object to the intrusion of the stories in the narrative of her life, but to me they illustrate so much, so effectively, showing us what she thought and found important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Below left is a photo of the Little Library outside O\u2019Connor\u2019s childhood home on Lafayette Square in Savannah, which we visited a few years ago. She loved birds, especially peacocks, and raised many of them. The movie scenes take place at the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop, in New York with her publisher, and mostly around Milledgeville, Georgia, where the family relocated when she was a teenager. We visited the house (below right) and museum in Milledgeville last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> critics\u2019 rating: 56%; audiences 74%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"bookshare,
Bookshare box outside Flannery O’Connor’s girlhood home with an adored peacock (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The award-winning author Flannery O\u2019Connor is something of an acquired taste. You may be familiar with her Southern Gothic stories, her preoccupation with religion, especially Roman Catholicism (she attended mass daily), her deep understanding of human nature and its propensity … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[265,57,104,29],"tags":[324,496,405,2194],"class_list":["post-11003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biography","category-movies","category-the-morgue","category-writing","tag-ethan-hawke","tag-flannery-oconnor","tag-laura-linney","tag-maya-hawke"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2Rt","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11003"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11006,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11003\/revisions\/11006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}