‘Wildcat’ Review: Maya Hawke Embodies Not Just Flannery O’Connor but the Spirit of Her Characters
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film Critic Flannery O’Connor saw folks in a way few writers did. She saw through them, past their petty prejudices and hollow pieties, to the less civilized selves they so desperately tried to keep under wraps.
But it wasn’t just O’Connor’s X-ray vision that made the Georgia-born author such an uncanny reporter on the human condition.
She also had the most extraordinary ear, capturing the music of how her people spoke, lacing regional turns of phrase one simply couldn’t invent into her stories, as if she were embroidering with barbed wire.
To plagiarize (but also to canonize) O’Connor: A good writer is hard to find. Lesser talents have been ripping her off for the nearly 60 years since she died, and rather than do the same, writer-director Ethan Hawke and his mid-20s daughter Maya (whose dead-ringer resemblance to mother Uma Thurman is its own kind of hurdle) do their best to let O’Connor’s own words define her in unconventional but appreciative freak-portrait “Wildcat.” The woman was a realist with a gift for the grotesque, and that Southern Gothic sensibility most definitely informs the film’s tough, rust-colored tone.
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