Let’s pray for a boy. The world is too cruel to girls.
Josephine Decker’s Shirley makes an interesting and fresh take on the traditional biopic. This isn’t, of course, a cradle-to-grave take on celebrated writer Shirley Jackson’s life. Most self-respecting biopics now focus on a specific period in the subject’s life rather than shove the whole thing into a feature length film. You can learn all you need to know through a single event if you tell the story well enough. Here, Decker, using the novel Shirley by Susan Scarf Merrell, reframes true events into a later period portrait of Shirley Jackson’s life. The resulting film gives us a compellingly impressionistic portrait of Shirley Jackson anchored by another stellar performance by Elisabeth Moss.
The central story involves a young couple (Logan Lerman, Odessa Young) who move in with Jackson and her husband Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg). Lerman’s Fred seeks tenure at Stanley’s Bennington College while Young’s Rose has been relegated to a “scullery maid,” as Stanley jokingly remarks. She’s to keep house for the seemingly mentally ill and agoraphobic Jackson. She initially hurls insults and withering looks at Rose – as only Elisabeth Moss can. You know those looks: head tilted down with big, expressive eyes glaring upward at her victim (patent pending). Jackson eventually becomes inspired to embark on a new novel, against her husband’s wishes, by newcomer Rose and by reports of a missing local college girl.
Thematically, Shirley explores the roots of Jackson’s potential insanity and, eventually, Rose’s near-insanity. Their damaged and fragile states are, the film theorizes, the result of systematic, non-physical abuse at the hands of philandering men. Lerman’s Fred quickly finds his footing at Bennington College and spends several nights at the “Shakespeare Society,” a seemingly academic pastime that’s really a code word for fucking around. Stanley, of course, is the king of the Shakespeare Society – or so we’re lead to believe. Girls fill his classes with adoring eyes, but he becomes increasingly jealous and spiteful toward Fred whose rises in the ranks of the Shakespeare Society.
But this isn’t a story about men.
It’s about the lingering impact of petty, wandering, jealous men on women. Women with infinite talents. Women who bring life into the world. Women whose faults lie in the men they trust. And the men who bring them down by berating and betraying them.
Shirley and Moss’s best scenes happen when Jackson faces off against husband Stanley. They’re each amused by their counterpart’s random verbal attacks. Stanley tries to one-up Jackson, but he’s not really in the same league mentally. He lavishes praise on her with as much ferocity as he tears her down. He constantly reminds her she’s not well. She’s drunk. She can’t go outside. Yet, he pushes her to write. It’s a complex, fascinating relationship between the tortured artist in Jackson and her husband who borderline despises her but is attracted to her inevitable brilliance. Think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf for reference, and you’re partially there.
And Moss’s performance is nearly indescribable. She captures the inherent loneliness in being a writer. Her Shirley Jackson pushes people away until they fascinate her enough to merit attention. Moss’s performance, in particular, brilliantly highlights the fact that most writers live in two worlds: the necessity of the external world that they tolerate and the internal world in which they thrive. Moss has pages of beautifully delivered dialogue, but the strength of her performance is everything working under the surface. She’s a bit like Hannibal Lecter that way – always observing, always watching, always calculating. While of course she’s not a cannibal, she does consume enough of Rose’s torment to, in the end, deliver another brilliant novel and rise above the pathetic Stanley.
Shirley may not get the facts about Shirley Jackson’s life perfectly right beat for beat. But it does leave you with a strong sense of the woman. A woman perfectly happy living within her own mind while the world around her struggles to interpret her. They’re as terrified by her ghoulish writing as they are by her unparalleled intelligence.
Or maybe they’re unnerved by that classic Elisabeth Moss stare: head tilted down with big, expressive eyes glaring upward at her victim.
Patent Pending.
Shirley is now streaming.
