Angelus News | May 17, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 10

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LITERATURE VS. LIFE
Ethan Hawke’s new biopic shows the difficulty
of capturing Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor’s
brilliance on screen.
Maya Hawke as Flannery
O’Connor in “Wildcat.” |
IMDB
BY NICK RIPATRAZONE
A
big part of what made Flannery
O’Connor stand out as a Catholic
writer was her honesty about
sin — including her own.
“Ideal Christianity doesn’t exist,” she
once wrote to a nun, “because anything
the human being touches, even
Christian truth, he deforms slightly in
his own image.”
O’Connor’s life — and her stories
— form the basis of “Wildcat,” a
long-awaited film directed by Hollywood
actor Ethan Hawke, and written
by Hawke and Shelby Gaines. “Wildcat”
stars Hawke’s daughter Maya as
O’Connor, and includes performances
from Philip Ettinger as the poet
Robert Lowell and Liam Neeson as a
priest who visits O’Connor’s bedside.
The film, like O’Connor’s stories, is
ambitious. But in attempting to emulate
her ambition, it falls short.
Such a result was perhaps inevitable.
Ethan Hawke’s vision is passionate;
he clearly enjoys and appreciates
O’Connor’s fiction. Yet she was both
a singular and strange talent. Her
strangeness arose from a willingness to
embrace and channel the mystery of
her art, a Catholic vision of the world.
The film depicts a scene at a party
where writers at a dinner table speak
skeptically of the Eucharist, including
28 • ANGELUS • May 17, 2024