Bedridden and anguished, the author Flannery O’Connor is visited by a priest (Liam Neeson in a cameo) in “Wildcat,” starring Maya Hawke. Affected by non secular agony and the systemic lupus that might kill her at 39, O’Connor, a lifelong Catholic, beseeches him: “I lengthy for grace,” she cries. “I see it, I do know it’s there, however I can’t contact it.”
There’s the seed of an excellent movie on this scene, however the filmmakers can’t fairly latch onto it. These intriguing wisps of concepts — about O’Connor’s wrestle with religion and objective — by no means coalesce right into a coherent portrait within the film (directed by Maya Hawke’s father, Ethan), which is offered as being based mostly on O’Connor’s quick tales.
The movie is supposed to animate her life by means of her work, with its observations about faith, violence and society’s hypocrisy, however that adventurous conceit can’t be fulfilled with out some components of a biopic. What we’re left with is a film that flits between incidents from the lifetime of this Nationwide E-book Award-winner, writing on the household farm in Georgia, amongst different locations, and a distracted supercut of her specific, and sometimes darkly comedian, model of Southern Gothic fiction. Half-sketched and typically onerous to observe, the tales glimpsed right here finally fail to supply a completely legible or constantly partaking arc of what should be a roiling inside world.
Maya Hawke’s efficiency, in flip, is muddled; she may be sturdy as O’Connor, however within the fictional items, her portrayals are sometimes decreased to clumsy caricatures. The interval re-creation is hanging and helps generate sometimes spellbinding imagery, however the enduring sense of the movie is of a household undertaking that’s by turns irritating and briefly enlightening.
Wildcat
Not rated. Working time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters.
