A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, February 23, 2025

Wildcat (Ethan Hawke, 2023)


Cast: Maya Hawke, Laura Linney, Philip Ettinger, Rafael Casal, David Towne, Cooper Hoffman, Steve Zahn, Nik Pajic, Willa Fitzgerald, Alessandro Nivola, Liam Neeson. Screenplay: Shelby Gaines, Ethan Hawke, based on stories by Flannery O'Connor. Cinematography: Steve Cosens. Production design: Sarah Young. Film editing: Barry Poltermann. Music: Latham Gaines, Shelby Gaines.

I wish there were more movies like Wildcat. Not that it's particularly good: Except for the acting, not much about it in conception and execution works very well. But it's made from the heart by someone with the status and income to see that it got made in an era when money (or lack of it) usually trumps love. It was born from Ethan Hawke's love for the stories of Flannery O'Connor, and maybe from the love for his daughter, Maya, who gives a fine performance as not only O'Connor but also some of the characters from her stories. It's this intermingling of O'Connor's life and fiction that proves to be the undoing of Wildcat, a brave idea undone by some bad ideas, like having Maya play a male character, Julian, in a section drawn from the story "Everything That Rises Must Converge." An unbilled cameo by Liam Neeson as a priest also stands out as a too-showy moment. But bravo to the Hawkes for a worthy effort. 

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