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.
The flex-straw starts picking up detritus: Who spent the $10 million is Ethan Hawke, and he has put his daughter in the film. Just what might be wrong with that? Well, I, not Ethan Hawke, am the heir apparent to things O’Connor, and I have an actress daughter too. Moreover, my daughter is out of actress work, and I am in the grave. I can not direct a movie as well as I did not teach writing. Would I presume to get compared to John Huston’s Wise Blood, easily the most deftly cast, true-to-source literary adaptation I can think of? Maybe not. But I was reading O’Connor in 1970 as Mr. Hawke was being birthed; I knew her cousin Louise Florencourt, executrix of the estate and the closest genotype to O’Connor a geneticist could find; I knew no one could write like O’Connor yet was trying to do it in the back of my brain like Hazel Motes’s Jesus running from tree to tree in the back of his mind. Got to go see this thing, nothing for it.
Done seen it. Mr. Moran is on it when he says the viewer innocent of the material may go down with migraine. Or she may not, free to grasp things as they occur without corrective: the this-is-a-hoot way in which many read O’Connor, myself included. Those who do know the material will quibble with, or scream at, what is selected from the work, what is distorted within the biography—this is what current parlance likes to call a “rabbit hole.” Let’s abjure the rabbit hole. Mr. Hawke and Company worked hard to invoke the terrain of a difficult life and a terrain of fiction that sproing out of it and I am going to just tip my hat and leave them alone. If you are not going to be of the quibbler camp, the movie is a lot of fun. The opening is a faux trailer for a movie that could have been made from O’Connor in a less aware day than today, a black-and-white overt noir “thriller” called Star Drake that while making fun of things makes one sit up as if presented with that which is not making fun of things. I got a Faulkner vibe from this “joke,” as if this might be his Temple Drake, not O’Connor’s Star Drake. But that is a rabbit-holey dissention. Skip it.
The movie does effect Real Life with immediate departures into Fictive Life, somewhat like the bivalved reenactments of Forensic Files. Sometimes this is too heavy handed, as when the fictive Misfit shoots someone (we presume the Grandmother—“A Good Man is Hard to Find”) and O’Connor at the typewriter collapses as if shot in the back of her head. As a non-migraine witness I’d have preferred to see Robert Penn Warren teaching Flannery O’Connor at Iowa rather than Cal Lowell teaching her I don’t know where. But this is rabbit-holing and I’ll say this: in the perhaps fictive teaching scene, in which O’Connor has read her story “Parker’s Back” to a workshop, there is a moment of genius. At the conclusion of her reading from a podium at the head of the class, a student sitting mid-depth—not at the front, not at the back—volunteers, unprompted, something to the effect of “The problem I have—” and Cal Lowell stops him, saying “There will be no critical dissection today” and dismissing the class. Class trudges out leaving Cal and Flannery to have a Moment. He has spared her the humiliation of explication and dithering, which will soon be going on in the larger world of publishing, wherein Lowell will in fact help get her from Rinehart to Robert Giroux for the publishing of Wise Blood.
The movie has an hallucinatory effect. The first breath of this is a party where O’Connor drops her bottle frightened by Lowell, who shares his with her, and then O’Connor endures the party with weird scenes in which certain characters freeze while others continue to move. The message is that O’Connor don’t fit in. As the movie progresses this effect deepens a bit as we see two actors—Maya Hawke and Laura Linney—represent twelve characters between them, making us lose our bearings just a tad. It seems as if Maya Hawke is altered via a dental prosthetic to represent her six different characters. The most displaced upper left cuspid is used to denote O’Connor herself, who did have a malocclusion.
What strikes me as least quibbleable is the presentation of the minor women, dramatically speaking, who are in no way minor to O’Connor, biographically speaking. Ditzed-out women (“We need another Margaret Mitchell,” “Why don’t you write something nice?”) are the chief inspiration of O’Connor’s rage. Men by comparison are spared, largely because they do not pretend to believe in Christ. Women do, and they also pretend unto non-racism. This pretense excites O’Connor. Pretenders in Life tend in Fiction to die or suffer humiliations beyond death. Mrs. May in “Greenleaf,” not featured here in Wildcat, is gored to death by a bull she has told us is “some nigger’s scrub bull.” (A classmate, a very early sensitivity editor at the party in Wildcat, tells O’Connor she should use “another word.” She tells him “No one I’m writing about would think of using another word” and to do so would be “propaganda.”)
So where are we? The format is the ostensible biography swapping into and out of, via fades and hard cuts, the Forensic Files reenactments of the fiction. This has inherent risks, as does, say, the musical where we shift from not-song to song. The familiar-with-material will quibble, those not will endure the migraine to greater or lesser extent, and both parties may engage in the hallucinatory wobble. The real question is does the movie convey the essence and the quintessence of what O’Connor tried to do and who she was. Unqualified yes in my view, and I cede my claims to Mr. Hawke, who had the hustle and the hutz to push this thing through. The viewer knows when all this happens—the cars and trucks and shacks and above all the hairdos (a hair consultant, a hair department head, a key hairstylist, three hairstylists, and a barber on duty) let us know it’s Georgia sometime after Sherman passed through it, unchanged. The viewer knows with certainty how badly O’Connor wanted to be a good writer, a hard enough thing without wanting to be a good writer in service to God. She was so good that the apostate can read her for the muscle and precision and finality of the writing alone, indifferent to the waltz of grace, which makes the writing, they say, as Twain said of classical music, even better than it sounds.
Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including Edisto, A Woman Named Drown, and Edisto Revisited, and three books of short stories, most recently Cries for Help, Various, as well as a volume of essays, Indigo: Arm Wrestling, Snake Saving, and Some Things in Between. He has written for Book Post on Donald Barthelme, Ivan Turgenev, Peter Taylor, William Trevor, and Charles Willeford, as well as a curricular reflection, “Eff the Classics.”
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