Bedridden and anguished, the writer Flannery O’Connor is visited by a priest (Liam Neeson in a cameo) in “Wildcat,” starring Maya Hawke. Tormented by spiritual agony and the systemic lupus that would kill her at 39, O’Connor, a lifelong Catholic, beseeches him: “I long for grace,” she cries. “I see it, I know it’s there, but I can’t touch it.”
There’s the seed of a good film in this scene, but the filmmakers can’t quite latch onto it. These intriguing wisps of ideas — about O’Connor’s struggle with faith and purpose — never coalesce into a coherent portrait in the movie (directed by Maya Hawke’s father, Ethan), which is presented as being based on O’Connor’s short stories.
The film is meant to animate her life through her work, with its observations about religion, violence and society’s hypocrisy, but that adventurous conceit can’t be fulfilled without some elements of a biopic. What we are left with is a movie that flits between incidents from the life of this National Book Award-winner, writing on the family farm in Georgia, among other places, and a distracted supercut of her particular, and often darkly comic, brand of Southern Gothic fiction. Half-sketched and sometimes hard to follow, the stories glimpsed here ultimately fail to produce a fully legible or consistently engaging arc of what must be a roiling inner world.
Maya Hawke’s performance, in turn, is muddled; she can be strong as O’Connor, but in the fictional pieces, her portrayals are often reduced to clumsy caricatures. The period re-creation is striking and helps generate occasionally spellbinding imagery, but the enduring sense of the film is of a family project that is by turns frustrating and briefly enlightening.
Wildcat
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters.
