As a director, Ethan Hawke could best be described as an eager enthusiast, at least judging by the likes of Blaze—his 2018 biopic about country singer-songwriter Blaze Foley—and 2001’s Chelsea Walls, his feature directorial debut, a series of stories inspired by the bohemian history of the movie’s setting, New York City’s Chelsea Hotel. How much enthusiasm you have for his movies is likely directly related to how much enthusiasm you have for his subjects, which is probably why I enjoyed Wildcat—his biopic of Southern Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor—the most.
Maya Hawke, the director’s daughter with Uma Thurman, plays O’Connor. Her performance is one of the movie’s strengths. The actual O’Connor once described the South as “Christ-haunted”—religious in cultural practice, but not devotion. Her difficult, occasionally gruesome stories—populated by mean, even evil characters—have always struck me as tests of her own beliefs as a committed Catholic. Can the meaning of Christ—the idea of grace given by God as a sacrificial gift—persist even in these settings, with these people? You can feel that tension all over Maya Hawke’s face—the spiritual agony and the courage.
Hawke also appears in dramatized scenes taken from O’Connor’s stories, playing various characters. Similarly, O’Connor’s mother (Laura Linney) also appears as characters in these dramatizations. It’s a bold conceit and a nice way to shake up the biopic format, but the performances in these sections all feel strident, something like O’Connor cosplay. The gap between Linney’s turn as O’Connor’s mother—full of complication and nuance—and her extremely Southern-belle take on the short-story characters is particularly wide. More often than not, these sequences rob O’Connor’s writing of its mystery.
Perhaps this is where Ethan Hawke’s enthusiasm, as director, gets the better of him. It’s interesting to contrast Wildcat with something like An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion’s 1990 biopic of New Zealand poet and novelist Janet Frame. Campion clearly reveres Frame’s work, but her movie doesn’t push too hard to make the case for the audience. She’s more interested in capturing her subject in poetically evocative details and seemingly inconsequential vignettes. The result is something inspired and unruly, whereas Wildcat—a movie that should also have those qualities—is a bit too eager for appreciation and love.
(5/17/2024)
