Flannery O’Connor populated her writing with smart, cynical southerners taking devilish pleasure in puncturing post-Confederate false pieties, though they’re often taken off guard by their enduring Christian credulities bred from birth – in other words, people much like O’Connor herself.
Ethan Hawke’s latest directorial outing Wildcat, which taps his daughter Maya to portray the author as she returns to her Georgia home, literalizes this connection with flights of fiction taking us inside her short stories. In text-within-a-text renderings of Good Country People and Everything That Rises Must Converge, Maya plays Flannery playing her stand-ins, and every small-minded housewife becomes her maddening mother (Laura Linney). Though Ethan’s fandom for a literary genius comes across loud and clear, he’s ultimately doing a disservice to her prose by reinforcing a reductive misconception about scribes: that inspiration, the ineffable alchemy he wants to pin down with his inquest into the crannies of the mind, boils down to plucking the right elements from your immediate surroundings and simply plugging them into narrative. “The life you save may be your own,” mumbles Flannery as she passes a roadside sign painted with the phrase that would title one of her later compositions. Simple as that.
