Speaking before a sold-out crowd at Milwaukee’s Oriental Theater this past Sunday, actor Ethan Hawke offered a cautious warning to his audience: “Beware when you throw away your geniuses, they have much to teach us.”
Hawke is currently on a multi-city Q&A tour promoting his new film “Wildcat,” a biopic about the late Roman Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor, starring his daughter Maya Hawke. The film is a passion project, originally pitched by Maya and subsequently written, directed, and produced by her parents. Being a practicing Episcopalian, progressive activist, and acclaimed artist, Hawke found a great deal of personal relation to the subject of his film: a woman who too grappled with her faith and creative ambitions.
The film has received generally positive to lukewarm reviews. I found the movie engaging, ambitious, and slightly ponderous at points, with an excellent lead performance by Maya Hawke.
However, the film’s release coincided with the artistic world’s reconsideration of O’Connor’s work due to allegations of racism. She lived in the Jim Crow South, in 1950s Georgia, and died amid the civil rights movement’s beginnings in 1964. Many of her posthumously published letters have suggested that her views reflected many of the unfortunate prejudices of her place and time.
“About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent,” O’Connor wrote in a May 1964 letter. “My question is usually would this person be endurable if white? If Baldwin were white nobody
