2 Films, 2 artists, 2 faiths: One airbrushed, one not

As March winds down, the Oscars have fast faded but their message continues.

While A Complete Unknown (2024) received eight Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, Oscar gold eluded it. Pity the filmmakers excluded Bob Dylan’s faith journey, eclipsing what the 1979 albums “Slow Train Coming” and “Saved” — along with the 1981 “Shot of Love”— were about, namely his conversion to Christianity. A conversion that was, perhaps, short-lived. 

But one film steeped in both artistry and faith — Wildcat (2023), based on the literary works and private writings of Flannery O’Connor — did not even receive an Oscar nomination.

Yet it stands out amid this year’s spiritually-vacant, if not faith-mocking, Oscar-winning films.

Its Oscar-worthiness is epitomized by the scene early on where Laura Linney plays the backwoods mother, Lucynell Crater, scammed by a drifter, based on O’Connor’s 1955 short story, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” whose daughter, also named Lucynell, played by Maya Hawke, is deaf. 

To its credit, the International Catholic Film Critics did nominate Wildcat for Best Picture.

Directed by Ethan Hawke, who is distantly related to Tennessee Williams, the film stars his daughter — gifted, beautiful Maya (Flannery O’Connor) — along with Linney (O’Connor’s mother) and Liam Neeson (Fr. Flynn), among other talented stars.

In telling Flannery O’Connor’s story, Wildcat artfully weaves in cinematic renderings of her novels and short stories. And, while initially confusing, the director’s vision ultimately works, given how it plays off against O’Connor’s story.

Shifting to 1950 New York City in the set-up, O’Connor meets with her editor John Selby at Rinehart for the first time, but not before ducking inside a Catholic Church as she prays, “Dear God … I want to write a novel, a good novel … please let me get down under things where you are.” 

And, so she does, writing Wise Blood (1952) about the confused son of a preacher, who founds his own Church Without Christ — where “the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.”

O’Connor is “amenable to criticism,” but then, when Selby asks for “an outline,” she tells him his criticism is acceptable “only within the sphere of what I am trying to do.”

The lady has spunk! Predictably, they come to an impasse and she leaves only to turn right back to make one thing “plain”: “I don’t outline,” she says. “I have to write to discover what I’m doing. And, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say and then I have to say it over again ...”

She has to develop as a writer as her artist’s soul tells her. “I will not be persuaded to do otherwise,” she says of his desire to turn her novel into a “conventional” work. “But I’m not writing a conventional novel. Wise Blood, when finished will be hopefully less angular but just as art if not arter than the first nine chapters.”

“Art” is the very definition of Flannery O’Connor, steeped in spirituality — the nexus of imagination and reality being faith — with that lovely Georgia accent and endearing femininity, so beautifully portrayed by Hawkes, reflecting her upbringing in Savannah on fashionable Lafayette Square, home to the ornate Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.

O’Connor had studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. When she arrived in Iowa City in September 1945, homesick, she finds solace at St. Mary’s Catholic Church and, discovering her imaginative-writing calling, switches to this Master of Fine Arts program.

She’s more interested in throwing herself in front of The Dixie Limited than writing an outline, she tells Robert “Cal” Lowell, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet and fellow Southerner she had befriended at an artists’ colony in Sarasota Springs, New York.

“He is an idiot,” says Cal.

Just before Christmas, Cal and Flannery meet again. A Harcourt editor, he reports, said, “‘That young Catholic writer is an astonishing talent.’ He wants to meet you …” 

Cal wants to go with her but she’s off to Georgia, only because of her mother, she says.  

The truth is, Flannery is quite sickly and that Christmas, would discover she had Lupus, never to leave Georgia again.

“I love you, Flannery,” Cal says, while telling her it’s “not a proposal.” He has “a lot of eggs to fry.”  

God was getting her ready for the banquet in Heaven while letting us feast on her Southern Gothic literary cuisine.

Something Wildcat movingly reveals. Audiences are ready for its spiritual depth. It’s high-time the Academy and filmmakers desiring Oscars discover this reality.