the Flannery O’Connor biopic — Dappled Things
Dorian Speed
Dorian Speed was hoping to see ducklings on a plane!
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Dappled Things
In early June 1952, after the publication of her novel Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor traveled back from her home in Milledgeville for a return visit to Ridgefield, Connecticut with her “adopted kin,” translator Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally. She had previously left the Fitzgeralds’ home in December 1950 after complaining of heaviness in her “typing arms” due, presumably, to revisions of the novel. What was supposed to be a short trip to stay with her mother in Georgia turned into a year and a half, during which she was diagnosed with lupus only ten years after losing her father to the same disease.

In Brad Gooch’s masterful biography Flannery, we learn that O’Connor returned to Connecticut “looking ravaged but pretty, with short soft new curls,” and, most critically, having smuggled three baby ducks on the plane as a surprise for the Fitzgeralds’ four children under the age of four.

Surely no argument is required to establish the importance of documenting this event on film. Perhaps it was omitted from the otherwise luminous Wildcat because viewers so transported with delight would be reluctant to return to the violent, scandalous world of O’Connor’s fiction.

Wildcat does not present itself as a conventional biopic of O’Connor, although it faithfully incorporates her piety and her wit via her own words from her prayer journal and private correspondence. Rather, it serves as an introduction to several of her stories and the mind that created them. The film juxtaposes these stories with scenes from the pivotal period in O’Connor’s life leading up to her diagnosis and her realization that her hopes of being a New York writer will not come to fruition. As she comes home to Milledgeville and the care of her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, the young Flannery surveys her surroundings. From them, she creates highly original work that initially struggled to find an audience.

O’Connor’s world in the film is narrowed primarily to her interactions with her mother, portrayed by Laura Linney with subtlety and grace, and with the writer Robert “Cal” Lowell, presented not only as her teacher but also an object of desire. These were presumably choices for narrative economy. Lowell is shown as her only correspondent, and O’Connor’s aunt Katie (“Duchess”) provides warmth and comic relief. By the end of the film a viewer might assume O’Connor cut herself off from the entire outside world in order to come into her flourishing as a writer.

Stories from the full scope of O’Connor’s career as a writer are dramatized during the film. Perhaps screenwriter/director Ethan Hawke and fellow screenwriter Shelby Gaines selected stories that they believed would best come to life onscreen, or perhaps we are meant to assume Flannery’s own experiences directly worked themselves out in her fiction. O’Connor sticklers may be surprised to see her dream up “Revelation,” which won the O. Henry Award for short fiction in 1965, while sitting in the doctor’s office with her mother more than ten years earlier. Yet the staging of this story in particular captures its humor and the psychological distortions of racism so effectively that such creative license is merited.

Maya Hawke and Laura Linney embody characters from the stories so thoroughly that it is hard to not assume Flannery herself is manifested within each work, whether as the intellectual Hulga Hopewell who falls under the spell of Bible salesman Manley Pointer (Cooper Hoffman) or the lusty but fanatical bride of O.E. Parker (Rafael Casal). Hawke’s range as an actress is well-showcased by her performances in these vignettes, as well as in her portrayal of O’Connor herself. Hawke has spoken about the impact of O’Connor’s work, particularly her prayer journal, on her own life, and creates a fitting testimony to the author’s achievements.

Towards the end of the film, Regina arranges a visit from the local priest, portrayed movingly by Liam Neeson. We might expect that his lack of familiarity with James Joyce (aside from his work being banned in Ireland) indicates he will function as yet another of O’Connor’s comically inept figures who, if acting as a vehicle of grace, do so despite themselves. Yet the conversation develops into a deeply moving examination of the artistic vocation. Flannery asks whether her stories are so scandalous that it might seem better for her to not write them at all, and fears that pride is the fundamental motivation for her art. The film’s greatest credit is its portrayal of O’Connor’s faith not as a stumbling block to grappling with reality, but as the animating principle of her work.

Flannery fans will delight at faithful details like her walking around in an oversized Georgia bulldog sweatshirt and her reaction to huge syringes of medication she owes to “to the pituitary glands of thousands of pigs butchered daily in Chicago, Illinois at the Armour packing plant.” The question is whether this film will succeed in its presumed goal of drawing a wider audience into conversation about O’Connor’s work.

The dramatizations of the stories often succeed in this regard, with the exception of (what is admittedly this writer’s favorite) “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” a work in which the writer’s own words are so essential to the whole that stagings of the story by Yale playwright Karin Coonrod specify that the work must be read aloud without excisions. Condensed into a few scenes of confrontation between the young writer Julian and his hopelessly, obliviously racist mother, the story as shown lacks cohesion. We as the audience already understand that O’Connor recognizes the racism of the midcentury South; the film could better explore how she herself grappled with what she recognized as her own prejudices.

When in residence at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the late 1940s, O’Connor read aloud what was then the second chapter of Wise Blood and later became the short story “A Stroke of Good Fortune.” In the film, this event is staged as her reading “Parker’s Back” to an awestruck audience of envious classmates. This choice presumably draws upon O’Connor’s feelings for Robert Lowell in creating the sparks between the worldly O.E. Parker and his zealously Christian bride, Sarah Ruth.

At the actual reading, fellow student Jean Williams said that she and the other “girl writer” “walk(ed) into people’s yards as if they were public domain, to gather arms full of flowering branches, taking only the most beautiful — and we carried them up to Flannery.” To portray this reality would have perhaps undercut the singularity of O’Connor’s vision.

Yet in emphasizing O’Connor’s loneliness, the film falls prey to the conventional narrative of writer as isolated genius. In reality, her deep friendships with the Fitzgeralds, with her literary mentor Caroline Gordon, and later with sparring partners Betty Hester and Maryat Lee continued to shape her work and tether her to the literary world. The scenes of O’Connor at her mailbox hint at the importance of correspondence, but limit it to exchanging letters with Robert Lowell. This is particularly ironic given that the standard advice for readers baffled by their first encounter with O’Connor’s work is to start with her letters. It was Sally Fitzgerald who collected them most comprehensively in the 1979 work The Habit of Being, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Special Award. O’Connor’s collected correspondence with Caroline Gordon, which began during the period depicted in the film, shows us a writer in search of mentorship and valuing the critique of her work. Most recently, editor Monica Carol Miller’s Dear Regina: Flannery O'Connor's Letters from Iowa shows the mutual devotion and generation gap between mother and daughter, most memorably in Flannery’s repeated requests for her mother’s homemade mayonnaise to be shipped to Iowa.

Those unfamiliar with O’Connor’s work will find it well-encapsulated here in its startling, revelatory oddness. Her wit and sharp characterizations are preserved especially in “Revelation” and a fake trailer for “Star Drake,” a loose retelling of the story “The Comforts of Home.” “That’s just another way she’s unfortunate,” admonishes Laura Linney’s character when her son decries houseguest Sarah Ham as a nymphomaniac. While we may wish that the immense role of her friendships with other writers were spotlighted better, the film succeeds in capturing the sensibilities and environment that shaped her fiction. Let’s hope the director’s cut features ducklings in flight.