The Big Picture

• Ethan Hawke's Wildcat is a unique, yet messy, biopic on Flannery O'Connor.
• The film fails in its admirable attempt to be a biopic and adaptation simultaneously.
• Maya Hawke shines as O'Connor herself, but Wildcat struggles to find its purpose.

This review was originally part of our coverage for the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.

In the literary world, Flannery O'Connor was a one-of-a-kind writer. While her works were often inspired by her devout Catholic faith, her writing went far beyond the kinds of stories that you heard during Sunday mass. O'Connor specialized in Southern Gothic tales which she used not only to employ her Catholicism, but to also explore themes of sex, race, disabilities, and atheism. Long story short, she was quite an interesting artist.

It makes total sense why somebody would want to make a movie about O'Connor, but a straightforward biopic or a direct adaptation of one of her works likely wouldn't do the author any justice. Ethan Hawke knows this and seems like the director to bring her to life. He's no stranger to mixing his big showy roles in mainstream fare like The Black Phone and Moon Knight with roles in more obscure titles like Adopt a Highway and Born to Be Blue, just to name a few. Not only that, but Hawke has also directed a handful of independent films including the 2018 drama Blaze and the 2006 film The Hottest State. With Wildcat, Hawke finds himself teaming up with his daughter Maya Hawke, who audiences will know as the scene-stealing Robin in Stranger Things, for a pseudo-biopic about O'Connor that, just like the author, is the furthest thing from conventional.

Wildcat primarily takes place as O'Connor (Hawke) is attempting to get her first novel published. As she writes, the events of real life slowly start to fade away. She begins to envision her own stories, often involving those around her. Some of these so-called visions happen to be so outlandish that if the film were to go mainstream, would likely lead to some mighty backlash from certain sectors of the audience.

Do I Need to Have Read Flannery O'Connor Before Seeing 'Wildcat?

Both Ethan and Maya Hawke have become household names, and a father-and-daughter teaming up to make a movie together is something sure to draw a lot of eyeballs towards it. While so many biopics will teach you a sanitized history of the subject, Wildcat is a different animal altogether. This is the kind of film that demands that its audience not only be familiar with the name Flannery O'Connor, but also know about her style of writing. Otherwise, how else would you be able to explain a scene involving Jesus confronting a racist played by Laura Linney and using the n-word, multiple times? That might read like something you would see in South Park, but it's also a scene that happens in Ethan Hawke's big swing of a biopic.

Right from the jump, Wildcat is something that may very easily alienate much of its audience, even opening with a black and white trailer advertising O'Connor's short story "The Comforts of Home" as some kind of campy, horny B-movie. In his direction, Ethan Hawke tries to convey the message that O'Connor's stories were more similar to her real life than you would have imagined. Unfortunately, much of the execution comes across as muddled as it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is fiction. An easy argument can be made that this was an intentional move, the ambition and ideas are there on screen, but they play out in a way that is messy, confusing, and unfathomably slow-paced.

As a film, Wildcat feels just as muted and emotionless as it portrays O'Connor herself. The film has a non-threatening runtime of 105 minutes, but the melancholic nature drags the story out to a level of near self-parody. Both of the Hawkes demonstrate the immense amount of research that they made for the film but at the cost of leaving most of the audience feeling a complete disconnect from everything that is happening on screen.

The screenplay, which was co-written by Ethan Hawke and Shelby Gaines, also isn't doing Wildcat any favors with dialogue that is often incomprehensible. The film is brimming with so much ambition and so many ideas that it is never able to fully have a grasp on what it wants the audience to take away from it. Those who are avid fans of O'Connor will likely just see an uneven and unconventional biopic that tries to have the best of both worlds by adapting some of the author's work and by talking about her personal life and demons. Everybody else will be leaving the theaters scratching their heads questioning what the heck they just watched and what was even the point of it.

Maya Hawke Is Excellent as Flannery O'Connor

All that aside, Hawke delivers some of her strongest work yet as an actress and it's her performance that makes it easier for the audience to be able to figure out what is happening on screen. The role itself is a challenging one, O'Connor was a radically different woman than the ones within the pages of her work, but Hawke can show her versatility by being able to play the more reserved author as well as Joy Hopewell, the one-legged atheist from the author's short story "Good Country People."

Aesthetically Wildcat is a pretty film to look at, especially on a big screen. Hawke reunited with cinematographer Steve Cosens who gives the film a chilly color scheme that perfectly compliments both O'Connor's day-to-day life and whatever is going on inside of her head.

For as much care and passion that the Hawkes put into Wildcat, the film never knows what it wants to be or even what audience it wants to be speaking to. Most of the approach ends up feeling rather aimless before cutting to the credits at the most abrupt moment, still leaving the audience in the dark about what they were supposed to take away from the experience.

Wildcat is now showing in theaters in the U.S. Click below for showtimes near you.

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