Nobody’s ever really known what to do with Mary Flannery O’Connor. They didn’t know when she was alive, and they haven’t known since she died in 1964, at 39, after years of battling through lupus to write her nervy, weird stories about Southerners, sin, religion and the God to whom she prayed so fervently. Her mother, Regina, with whom O’Connor lived for the last third of her life in Milledgeville, Ga., once asked her daughter’s publisher, Robert Giroux, if he couldn’t “get Flannery to write about nice people.” He couldn’t. Not that he would try.
The screen adaptations of O’Connor’s work have not quite captured her essence either, though some attempts have been more successful than others. A telling instance comes in “The Life You Save,” a 1957 TV adaptation of her short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” starring Gene Kelly in his first small-screen role. He plays Tom T. Shiftlet, a one-armed vagrant who talks a woman into taking him on as her handyman, then marries her mute, deaf daughter, Lucynell. Tom and Lucynell drive off toward their honeymoon and then, at a diner, as Lucynell naps on the counter, Tom makes his getaway. In the story, Tom picks up a hitchhiker, who insults him before leaping out of the car, and Tom just keeps driving away. In the TV version, however — presumably to avoid offending viewers’ delicate sensibilities — Tom has a change of heart, returning to the diner to retrieve Lucynell after all.
That kind of moment would never have made it into an O’Connor story. She saw the episode, and “the best I can say for it is that conceivably it could have been worse,” she said. “Just conceivably.” (It paid for a new refrigerator for her and Regina.) She was not interested in writing tales of cheap redemption, or those that dramatize a change of heart that brings about a pasted-on happy ending, even if they’d have sold a lot better. Her stories are full of darker things, the “action of grace in territory held largely by the devil,” as she put it. A traveling Bible salesman steals a dour intellectual woman’s false leg. A young man berates his mother for her backward views on race until she has a stroke. A family on the way to a vacation is murdered by a roving serial killer. A pious woman beats the hell out of her reprobate husband after he gets a giant tattoo of Jesus on his back.
“Wise Blood,” John Huston’s 1979 adaptation of O’Connor’s 1952 novel of the same name, comes much closer to her uncomfortable tales of uncomfortable grace. The book was adapted by Benedict and Michael Fitzgerald, sons of Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, close friends of O’Connor (she lived with them for a while, and they edited “Mystery and Manners,” her 1969 collection of lectures and essays). “Wise Blood” is the story of a somewhat unhinged veteran named Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif), the grandson of a traveling preacher, who returns to his Tennessee home and tries to spread an antireligious gospel, only to discover he can’t quite get away from God. The Fitzgeralds chose Huston to direct in part because he, like Motes, was an avowed atheist, and they thought that’s what O’Connor would have wanted: a director who wasn’t afraid to skewer the pieties of her native South. But on the last day of shooting, Huston turned to Benedict Fitzgerald and said, “I’ve been had.” He realized he hadn’t managed to tell an atheist’s story at all. He’d told O’Connor’s story, and that meant it was soaked in hideous divine grace.
What none of these capture is the author herself, which is the task that Ethan Hawke’s new film, “Wildcat,” takes on. The result is not entirely satisfactory, at least as a stand-alone film; to borrow the form of a cinephile joke, “Wildcat” is for O’Connor fans, not biopic critics. That’s not to say it’s destined for the dustbin — this critic, anyhow, liked it very much. But if you’re not steeped in O’Connor’s life and work already, “Wildcat” is not all that accessible.
But to my eye, “Wildcat” gets O’Connor just about right. She’s hardly an obscure author, but her peculiar combination of fervent faith, unsentimental satire and flair for the bizarre have made her a patron saint to many writers who explore the fault lines between religion and belief, transgression and salvation. Hawke’s film gets this in spades, spotlighting text drawn from her prayer journals (published in 2013) and quips that are, among her devotees, famous and repeatable. For instance, during a dinner at the writer Mary McCarthy’s house, O’Connor memorably declared that if the Eucharist was “just a symbol, to hell with it.” (The movie places this at a different dinner party, in a different city, but the gist is the same.)
The O’Connor of “Wildcat” — played by Maya Hawke, Ethan Hawke’s daughter, who became obsessed with O’Connor while looking for Juilliard audition material — is prickly, funny, and also afraid of the cosmic tug of war between being a great writer and loving God sufficiently. It’s all exacerbated by her physical pain from lupus, the disease that killed her father, and her emotional pain at being back in Georgia, back with her mother, back among people whom she views as having replaced true Christian faith with propriety, niceness and the mandate to uphold social norms. (O’Connor’s views on race are complex and unsatisfactory; from her stories you’d think she was progressive, but her own letters tell another story.)
The way “Wildcat” tackles this is vaguely reminiscent of “Short Cuts,” Robert Altman’s 1993 film that placed various Raymond Carver stories in the same universe, with characters crossing over from one story to the next. In “Wildcat,” Hawke and Laura Linney, who plays Regina in the movie’s main narrative, reappear in dramatizations of several of O’Connor’s best-known short stories, which crop up like dreams in her subconscious. The movie posits that each story wasn’t so much a plot drawn from O’Connor’s life as a sliver of light, dancing on a wall, a refraction of whatever vexed or amused or disgusted her in the world. They are sometimes caricatures — as O’Connor wrote, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” But they’re also her active mind’s way of processing, and reproducing, what she senses about the world. No wonder they were disconcerting to her readers.
When I finished college and, for the first time, was able to freely choose my own reading material quite apart from the demands of school, I picked up the thick volume of O’Connor’s complete stories, edited and published by Giroux. (I would heartily recommend it, but not perhaps to a burned-out recent graduate looking for a break.) In the years since I’ve often found myself sitting under the wisdom of O’Connor, and in particular her ideas about the function of storytelling in our age. Somehow her ideas in “Mystery and Manners” feel even more urgent in our time, when fiction is often assigned a moralizing, instructive role, and readers are often obsessed with finding “relatable” characters.
One of her sentiments has stuck with me as a rubric for watching and thinking about movies, which is what I spend most of my professional life doing. She wrote that to understand good fiction requires “the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.” The same idea cropped up over and over in her work: that an artist’s job — particularly for the artist who believes in a world beyond what’s seen — was to filter truth through the wild confusion of life, to tell things as she saw them but give the enigma of being a human a wide berth.
“Wildcat” grabs all of that and molds it into a slice of O’Connor’s life. Its central scene isn’t from her writing at all. It’s when she’s bedridden with lupus and asks for a visit from a priest (played by Liam Neeson). The priest at first offers her pleasantries and aphorisms about dealing with suffering, but after listening to her agony, his affect changes. He, as she does, understands the pain of trying to see his way through the fog of life.
She begs for reassurance that it’s good to pursue her writing and that God also cares for her. “Is your writing honest?” the priest asks her. “Is your conscience clear?” When she nods, he continues. “Then the rest,” he says, “is God’s business.” It seems to be just what she needs to hear. There’s no easy way to deal with O’Connor’s work and life, its messiness and weirdness and discomfort, and even a movie like “Wildcat,” with its grasp of its subject, can only go so far. But O’Connor, at least, knew exactly what she was doing.
