Father-daughter duo Ethan and Maya Hawke made the film Wildcat together after Maya pitched it to her father’s production company. Ethan agreed to write and direct, and Maya was cast as the lead. Its existence is not not a nepotism issue, but the real issue with Wildcat — the part-biopic of Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) and part-adaptation of her life’s work — is not whether its lead role was cast with familial lineage in mind over talent. The issue is simply that the film is not a very good one: it’s disjointed, impersonal, and breathes little life into the artist it strives to represent.
Wildcat is rightfully fascinated by the gaps and contradictions that can exist between an artist’s life and their creations. Flannery O’Connor was a quiet, chronically ill, unmarried Catholic woman, but her well-known and well-loved work was dark, sharp, sexual, and subversive. Unfortunately, Wildcat makes an uninteresting martyr of its subject and does little justice to her work as it clumsily intercuts between O’Flannery’s own tragic life and some tacky, rapid-fire “adaptations” of her stories.
The sometimes-contradictory nature of an artist versus their work does not blend with any ease in the way Wildcat tells this story. The film’s shifts between reality and adaptation are often jarring, and not tied by any clear theme. These shifts are further confused by the fact that Maya Hawke often plays a separate character within the adaptations. This is a creative decision that not only over-complicates the film but also implies, rather presumptuously and boldly, that O’Connor used her short stories as a place to self-insert.
The Hawke family duo is insistent that they were able to get through all representations of sexuality in this film without any tension between father-director and daughter-actress. This I can quite easily believe.
Wildcat is a film about a repressed, subversive Catholic woman devoured by yearning and trapped away in her childhood bedroom. One could not thread in more potential for taboo eroticism to ooze out. But Wildcat is deeply, deeply unsexy. O’Connor’s moments of yearning and desire fail to hold weight outside of schoolgirl dreaminess, and the sex scenes within the adaptations feel clinical and bland. For a film with such potential for fraught, rich explorations of desire and repression — evidenced even by the connotations of the film’s title — O’Connor’s inner workings around these matters feel untapped.
In one of the part-daydream, part-adaptation portions of Wildcat, a woman snarls at Maya Hawke’s character, “Some people’s parents give them everything.” One wonders if the Hawkes ever considered how this line may play in a movie that seems very much cast and executed with bloodline and reputational strings attached. I think we are perhaps not working with a film that is just a nepotism baby issue, though. Given the film’s unpolished nature, Wildcat wouldn’t and shouldn’t have been made in its current form, were it not for the names attached.
