Wildcat is the story of Flannery O'Connor (Maya Hawke), a Southern Catholic writer who lived from 1925 to 1964 and was disabled by Lupus in her later years. Although the movie shows O'Connor traveling to Iowa and New York to further her writing career, most of the plot takes place in her family's home as she types away on multiple drafts of her stories while the disease takes its toll. O'Connor is shown as socially awkward, and her mother and others cannot comprehend the motivations for her fiction. Possessing a strong faith, she explores the bizarre and twisted ways in which people can be affected by religion.
Interspersed with slow-moving scenes of O'Connor's life (non-chronological) are scenes from her fiction, acted out by the same cast of characters. Where the real segues into the fictional is sometimes hard to discern. The fictional scenes provide some insight into O'Connor's mindset but, having not read her writing in many years, I was hoping for even more insight into the influences on her writing (I probably hoped for too much). The movie is a portrait of a troubled soul that will interest her devoted readers and perhaps entice others to sample her offbeat fiction.
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