In 2009, Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories was named the best book ever to receive a National Book Award. It had been almost 50 years since O’Connor died at 39 years old of lupus, yet her work was still being read and publicly celebrated, chosen above such esteemed writers as Alice McDermott, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, and so forth.

Now in 2024, a year before her centennial, a feature film is being released on Friday that focuses not only on O’Connor’s fiction but also on her life. Wildcat, directed and written by Ethan Hawke (co-written by Shelby Gaines) and starring Maya Hawke and Laura Linney, among others, has been piquing fans’ interests since the rumors about its production began a few years ago. Now the moment has arrived, and Wildcat will not disappoint O’Connor enthusiasts. However, I wonder how much of a following it will attract outside of those who already love the literary genius. 

The film centers on 1950, a significant year in O’Connor’s life, the year she returned to Milledgeville, Georgia, from her years of graduate school at Iowa and postgrad in the Northeast. Interspersed into this biographical transition are the stories that O’Connor published over her lifetime.

For those who have read Revelation, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Parker’s Back, Good Country People, and other highlights, these renditions are welcome visuals. Seeing them dramatized on screen brings the work to life in a new way. Characterizations are deepened, drama is heightened in key moments of the story, and viewers are left asking questions that may never have occurred to them after decades of knowing O’Connor’s work.

Particularly beneficial is the intensity with which these roles are performed by amazing actors. For anyone who has become overly familiar with O’Connor’s stories, the portrayals defamiliarize them so we can hear them anew. 

Also, throughout the film, we see O’Connor perform her own work: at the typewriter, hobbling around her room, or reading from the podium at the University of Iowa as a student. Seeing her delight in moments, seeing her frustration in others, and watching the response of students and of her professor in the scenes attunes our ears again to how lovely and comic is O’Connor’s prose. Whereas some writers’ books are meant more for silent meditation, O’Connor’s stories are meant to be read aloud and performed.

Wildcat highlights the minutiae that made up O’Connor’s world: rosary beads, dirt roads, highway signs, the mailbox, proper Southern ladies in gloves and coiffured hair, and, of course, peacocks. While O’Connor may have written philosophically deep stories, these particular details remind us of the sensory reality of her world and how to attend then to our own better.

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Watching the film, what may have felt like parabolic tales come to be incarnate as truer than fiction. Perhaps, as the ideal audience for Wildcat, my delight in the film is expected. Then again, one could argue that knowing the world and fiction of O’Connor too well would make me prejudiced against any attempts to adapt her to screen.

Yet, I am converted. I found the film moving, convicting, and uplifting, all at the same time. I wish more films could somehow manage the balance of aesthetics and entertainment half as well as Wildcat did. And, of course, it’s unsurprising that I always wish for more of Flannery O’Connor.

Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones chairwoman of great books at Pepperdine University and author of several books, including Flannery O’Connor’s Why do the Heathen Rage?