Anyone unfamiliar with her life and work may remain so after Ethan Hawke’s latest, Julia Hamilton despairs.
In his latest film, Wildcat, about the American Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), director Ethan Hawke (together with his co-writer Shelby Gaines) continues his fascination with the creative process that was apparent in his last film, Blaze, inspired by the life of the Texan songwriter Blaze Foley.
Hawke is clearly familiar with O’Connor’s oeuvre, drawing not just from her fiction but also her letters and diaries, some of which are only fairly recently in the public domain; her Prayer Journal, for instance, which demonstrates her desire to be the writer she wanted to be without displeasing God. “If my writing is scandalous,” she asks a priest (Liam Neeson) towards the end, “can it still serve God?” In spite of posing the question, the film makes no attempt to answer it.
Instead, Hawke goes off-piste in this frankly weird mish-mash portrait of the writer, choosing to focus on an important time in her writing life: when O’Connor was obliged by the onset of lupus to return to her native Georgia, to live at home with her mother at Andalusia Farm near Milledgeville. By that point she had learned how to write from her time at Iowa and then Yaddo, and was already part of an important group of writers, including the brilliant Robert “Cal” Lowell and Robert Fitzgerald.
The severity of her illness, however, meant she couldn’t stay by herself in New York; she had no option but to go back to mother, thus down home in Georgia is where we begin. Hawke’s (frankly baffling) way of demonstrating to the viewer how O’Connor worked (thankfully, a very brief part of the overall action) is to show us her characters emerging fully fledged from brain to page to screen, in two different stories from this period: Good Country People and Everything That Rises Must Converge.
Okay, marks for trying… It’s a homage to Hawke’s passion for O’Connor, but to depict the mysterious alchemy of the creative process in such reductionist terms – see a character, change their name and then transcribe what you observe onto the page/screen and say, “Look, fellas, this is how it’s done” is absurd, and makes a mockery of her.
As a writer, O’Connor was not in the least given to pastiche and other modernist tropes, and yet that is the tricksy, unsatisfying path Hawke has chosen here, as if the creative process is like cooking: do this, get that. The result is audacious, but lumpy and unpalatable.
It also means friends and family become indistinguishable from the Dixie caricatures she imagined, which may of course be the point Hawke intends to make. Of all people, he should know that the creative process is much murkier than this.
It’s no secret that O’Connor took her characters from life – particularly her mother, Regina – but if her writing seems simple on the surface, its greatness surely lies in the complexity behind such apparent ease and the way she allows readers to mine meaning for themselves, drawing them into the creative process in a way Hawke doesn’t seem to understand and certainly doesn’t manage to convey here, very possibly because it is beyond the bounds of film-making.
Flannery herself is played by Hawke’s daughter, Maya, famous from Stranger Things, and her mother, Regina, by the usually peerless Laura Linney. Maya Hawke is also, however, the lookalike daughter of Uma Thurman, and no one in the audience could be fooled for a single second by this raging beauty as a bewigged invalid, complete with bad skin and weird teeth, looking more like a character from a Halloween party than the distinguished author she is supposed to represent.
Although this is meant to be a film about a writer and the abiding mystery of her creative process, it bears precious little relation to O’Connor’s actual life, in which her illness properly crippled her. After her return to Georgia she couldn’t physically stray far from the rocking chair in which she wrote diligently every day.
“I’m a writer and I farm from the rocking chair”, she said in a TV interview in 1955; nevertheless, in this film she charges about on her crutches doing almost anything but writing, being too busy herding peacocks and going to Mass most of the time to attend to her duties as a famous writer in the making. Apart from one clackety-clack moment just after the film’s rather baffling prologue, we hardly see her at work at all.
Hawke and Gaines’s aim here is to blend O’Connor’s tortured personal life with the writer who felt her work was in conflict with her faith, but didn’t know what to do about it, other than to just keep going. The portrayal of how she worked is fatally over-simplified and the bigger, darker question of her faith and her uneasiness about whether God would approve of what she was writing is left unanswered. The artifice of the director gets in the way of the life instead of enhancing it, and those unfamiliar with her work will be none the wiser.
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