Shirley (2020)
dir. Josephine Decker
Rated: R
image: ©2020 Neon
In the opening scenes of Shirley, central character and audience surrogate Rose Nemser meets the writer Shirley Jackson at a house party. Rose and her husband, Fred, will be houseguests of Jackson and her husband, literary critic and Bennington College English professor Stanley Edgar Hyman, while the newlywed Nemsers look for their own place. Fred has just accepted a job in the English department at Bennington, and Stanley is to be Fred’s mentor.
Upon their meeting at the party, Rose compliments Shirley’s recently published short story, The Lottery. She tells Shirley that reading it “made me feel thrillingly horrible.” There is no more apt description for my own emotional state while watching Shirley. It is a thrillingly horrible experience, perhaps the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. Any fan of Shirley Jackson’s work should be entranced by it.
Personally, I have relatively little experience with Jackson’s writing. I read The Lottery in high school and suffered through The Haunting, the dreadful 1999 Jan de Bont adaptation of her penultimate novel The Haunting of Hill House. Still, that limited exposure to Jackson’s bibliography gave me a frame of reference for director Josephine Decker’s brilliantly realized film about the mid-20th century writer.
Shirley is based on author Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel of the same name. Both blend fact and fiction, incorporating real events in Jackson’s life with a wholly invented plot involving the fictional Rose and Fred Nemser. Decker’s adaptation is a clever and surreal twist on the standard (and more often than not, dull) conventions of the biopic.
If Shirley is a biopic at all, it’s by way of psychological thriller. Decker and screenwriter Sarah Gubbins infuse myriad themes into the picture, everything from dread of pregnancy and childbirth, female sexual desire, toxic male behavior (with plenty of toxic female behavior, too), and psychological mind games.
The story takes place over the course of a year or so in 1949 and 1950, as Jackson works on her second novel, Hangsaman. That novel was partially inspired by an 18-year-old Bennington College student named Paula Jean Welden who, during a walk in the woods in late 1946, disappeared.
If there’s one fault to Shirley, it’s that Decker’s attempts to tie Jackson’s obsession with Welden’s disappearance to the unstable writer’s abuse of her longer-than-expected house guest Rose never fully materialized for me. Actor Odessa Young plays Rose and Paula, as the latter appears in Jackson’s ominous visions of the girl’s last hours. There’s something missing – something I can’t fully articulate – in the attempted connection between the two characters Young portrays.
Just about everything else in Shirley works splendidly. I felt the visceral dissent into madness as the Nemsers are asked to extend their stay in Shirley and Stanley’s house from a few weeks to months on end. Stanley is really looking for a house keeper and someone to keep an eye on Shirley, and he’s not above using his power over his green new colleague to get one. Rose becomes an unwitting pawn in the power struggle between Shirley and Stanley. The mind games they play with both Rose and Fred – which are only fully revealed in the final, transcendent minutes of the movie – took a toll on my own psyche.
The brilliant cast of Shirley does a lot to foment the movie’s dark undertones by bringing these vivid and vicious characters to life.
Elisabeth Moss continues to prove her acting mastery with her portrayal of Jackson. There are a few brief moments where her performance becomes a little too mannered for its own good, but otherwise Moss fully embodies Jackson as a dazzlingly talented but vindictive and emotionally disturbed artist. Her work here comes on the heels of her astounding performance as a broken musician in 2019’s Her Smell. The work she’s done in creating that character and portraying Jackson in Shirley has cemented in my mind Moss’s status as one of the best actors working in American cinema today.
In an ironic twist on one of his earlier roles, veteran character actor Michael Stuhlbarg brings a sense of menace to Shirley’s husband, the sadistic Professor Stanley Hyman. Stuhlbarg also played a college professor in the tender and emotional Call Me by Your Name, but the two characters – and Stuhlbarg’s work in each role – couldn’t be more different. Putting the two performances side-by-side makes it clear how versatile and talented of an actor Stuhlbarg is.
Odessa Young is also very good as Rose, a woman sucked into, and almost destroyed by, Jackson’s mercurial personality. It’s through Rose – and Young’s delicate crafting of the character – that Shirley explores its rich set of themes.
The character delivers the movie’s preoccupation with female desire as early as the first few minutes when Rose is overcome with lust for Fred as the two ride a train to their new living arrangements. The film also wades into the complex dynamics of power and sex as Rose becomes more emotionally entangled with Shirley. She must also contend with the sleazy advances of Stanley, whose philandering – particularly with his young students – is a source of bitterness between the literary-minded couple.
Rose’s pregnancy causes Shirley to ruminate on the horrors of childbearing and motherhood. One of the most potent visual metaphors of the film is Rose – who makes dinner for the quartet every night – rolling an egg back and forth on the kitchen counter before letting it fall to the floor. When the camera pans down, we see that Rose has done the same with a half-dozen more eggs.
Supporting the script’s themes are Sue Chan’s production design, Kirby Feagan’s art direction, and Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s cinematography. Their work produces a lush environment and comes together to create a sense of fecundity in the world of the movie. Every square inch of Jackson and Hyman’s home is stuffed with products of creativity, mostly books. The outside of the house is almost completely covered with ivy; the pastoral setting of the house (on the edge of a wooded area) is teeming with flora. Shirley is a movie obsessed with procreation, both creative and literal.
Josephine Decker has synthesized her themes into an incredibly rich, deeply layered film that excites and titillates as much as it repels and horrifies. Her movie is an intriguing maze of dark desires and psychological head games.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- Shirley is the most thematically rich film of the year so far. Add that to the stellar cast, wonderful direction, and production design that perfectly complements Josephine Decker’s vision, and it’s an early contender for my top ten of the year.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I was a bit apprehensive in the early minutes of the film, because I thought it might go down the “difficult artist” route with two hours of brilliant people being awful, which is nothing we haven’t seen before. But, I reminded myself that the central role in most of those stories are men. Shirley is different, because it’s a woman this time, which is in itself novel. Plus, it turned out I was wrong. Shirley is so much more than that cursory description.
- I was absolutely delighted to see Robert Wuhl pop up for a total of three minutes in a bit part. We need more Robert Wuhl in our lives.
- The musical score by Tamar-kali is creepy and kept me on edge. There is a recurring motif of women sighing throughout the movie that is very effective.
- One scene seems (at least to me) to be riffing on a scene from another great movie. At one point, Shirley and Stanley attend a faculty party, and Stanley begins dancing around the room. It instantly put me in mind of the party scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. No nudity, and Shirley doesn’t take the surreal turn that movie does, but at the very least, there is a similarity in tone.
- I mentioned the contrasting aspects to Stuhlbarg’s characters in Shirley and Call Me by Your Name. There is one brief moment when Stanley sits on a couch with Shirley that echoes Stuhlbarg’s character in CMBYN sitting on a couch with his son. The camera is in a different location, but otherwise, it’s staged almost exactly the same.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Week thirteen. I’m loving Neon’s deal with Hulu to bring their movies so quickly to streaming during the pandemic. The arrangement is how I also saw Spaceship Earth a few weeks ago.