Ethan Hawke Directs His Daughter in ‘Wildcat.’ But Their Movie’s a Bust.
Wildcat, the Ethan Hawke-directed, Maya Hawke-starring Flannery O’Connor biopic, begins with a trailer for an entirely different movie, a black-and-white drama about “Star Drake,” the alias of a character from O’Connor’s short story “The Comforts of Home.” Star Drake was dubbed the town floozy who pays for everything with bad checks. The trailer feverishly describes the plot as “the outspoken story of an indiscreet woman,” a phrase that could indeed describe a movie about the author herself. But the film that follows is muted, restrained, even dreamlike, a portrait of an artist that paints her life—controversial, complicated—according to her work.
Maya Hawke plays Flannery at the cusp of her battle with lupus, the disease that took her father’s life when she was a teenager, and that will claim her own at 39. The film follows along as her mother Regina (Laura Linney) transfers her from her short stay in New York amongst the literary luminaries of the time, back home to Georgia and the childhood farmhouse in which Flannery will spend the rest of her life. Hawke and Linney circle each other, as mothers and daughters with prickly relationships do. Regina has read her daughter’s stories but isn’t exactly a fan: “I don’t understand,” she says mincingly. “Why you don’t want to write something that people would like to read?”
Between these scenes, the film dramatizes a few of O’Connor’s short stories, including “Revelation,” “The Enduring Chill,” "Everything that Rises Must Converge,” and “Good Country People.” In a burst of stylistic flair, Hawke and Linney and the rest of the film’s main cast appear as the characters in them. They appear almost as visions, with Hawke as Flannery “playing” her analogs—a young college student, an aspiring writer with a loudly racist mother, an easily charmed girl with a wooden leg. Linney appears as the mothers, the spinsters, and, in one of the film’s better sections, the woman at the center of “Revelation,” who reacts in horror when her vision of Jesus Christ says he is able to reincarnate her as either white trash or a Black person, before choosing the Black person (for which she uses a different word).