Review: Padgett Powell on “Wildcat,” a film about Flannery O'Connor

Can a movie convey the essence and the quintessence of what the author tried to do and who she was?

Trailer for Wildcat, directed by Ethan Hawke

Flannery O’Connor is 100 and dead, Clifton Chenier is 100 and dead, Dick Van Dyke is 100 and alive. I myself live in a shallow, makeshift grave of literary desuetude. My condition is a little beyond that of the normal second-term comatose American, owing to a sacking of my last book by a “sensitivity editor” loosed on it at the eleventh hour. It drove me to the Trump ten-yard line. That is all I will say. I lost my will to barbecue because I let this happen, and I now breathe lightly through a Sweetheart straw I have pushed through the dirt above my face.

I have detected that there is a new Flannery O’Connor property on the horizon, more or less out of her grave, as it were. The details elude me with respect to origin, if it is a found manuscript, and so forth, but the report via the flex-straw is that there is a “biopic of Flannery O’Connor, Wildcat, in wide theatrical release.”

I write a student of mine, a survivor of my inept 3.4 decades-long tenure as a schoolmarm of writing. He is a unique sport in that tenure: I refused him admission to a course on the basis of a submitted manuscript I deemed plagued by gratuitous withholding, and he slipped under a wire and got admitted to the course, and then handed in the best piece of writing I saw in all the classes I taught in that endless slog of teaching That Which Cannot Be Taught even if you are qualified to teach it. (See John Moran, “Clog Warrior,” in what might be called the predecessor to these pages, Little Star.) Mr. Moran has gone on to found a journal of his own, Panacea Review, predicated on interesting premises.

He is prompt in response:
Just saw it. An admirable effort, like Franco’s adaptations of Faulkner, in that you imagine it’s giving a migraine to anyone who isn’t previously familiar with the material. It’s an anthology of stories like “Revelation” and “Parker’s Back” woven into biography; one minute Flannery is arguing with ma, climbing the stairs in crutches, painfully clacking at the typewriter, then fade to Hulga in the barn getting her leg stolen, fade back. It captures the balances of comedy and Bible in the stories but Lord, it’s dour. Still, not everyday someone spends $10 million dollars on Mr. Shiftlet leaving Lucynell at the diner, you might give it a go.