‘Shirley’ Review: A Writer as Scary as Her Stories, Michael Stuhlbarg and Elisabeth Moss in “Shirley.”, “The Lottery” was published in The New Yorker in 1948, an excellent recent biography by Ruth Franklin. “Shirley,” adapted by Sarah Gubbins from Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel, will never be mistaken for a biopic. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Auteur Filmmaking and was released on June 5, 2020, by Neon. At times the academic power games Shirley and Stanley play with Rose and Fred evoke Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” At other moments the volatile connection between Rose and Shirley recalls the fraught creative mentorship in “Madeline’s Madeline,” Decker’s 2018 film about a teenager in thrall to the charismatic leader of a theater company. All Rights Reserved. A very 21st-century loss of nerve. Strangely aroused by the power of Jackson’s writing, she drags her husband, Fred (Logan Lerman), into the lavatory for sex. This unusual film isn't so much a biopic as it is a biographical-literary fantasia. Decker’s last film was the beguiling and unique Madeline’s Madeline. Evidently, Stanley and Shirley have an arrangement — he can cheat, so long as he doesn’t hide these dalliances from his wife — and she has mistaken Rose for whichever co-ed he’s picked as his latest conquest. Moss bristles with malevolence as a fictionalised version of Shirley Jackson but the film’s early menace fizzles out, Thu 29 Oct 2020 09.00 GMT The story of Hangsaman is equally intriguing for a contemporary audience—based on the actual disappearance of a Bennington student, it mixes fiction and reality to tell a tale of a young woman losing her mind at a liberal-arts college. (CNN)Elisabeth Moss has a knack for being interesting even in so-so movies and continues to pick varied and challenging roles. Featuring “The Handmaid’s Tale” actor Elisabeth Moss in the title role, this queer, hard-to-quantify psychological study isn’t a biopic so much as a séance — a quasi-occult attempt to invoke the spirit of such a singular author, who reinvented a genre before her death half a century ago, via a film that seeks to channel her unsettling style. Why she should take Rose any more seriously remains to be established, though they’ll get the chance to know one another more intimately in the months that follow, since Stanley, concerned with Shirley’s declining health and sanity, invites Fred and Rose to share their close-to-campus lair (another Shirley-ism: “A clean house is a sign of mental inferiority”). In the decades since, Shirley Jackson’s unnerving allegorical tale of ritualized small-town cruelty has spooked and intrigued countless readers, including many who first encountered it in a high school English class. Fred, a bland and ambitious young scholar, has been hired to assist Stanley with his classes. While Moss captures the complexity of Shirley's personality, the movie sheds scant light on the underlying why of it all. The film begins with Rose and her husband, Fred (Logan Lerman), a Ph.D. student studying under Stanley, moving into Stanley and Shirley’s home to help around the house. They are both victims of a hypocritical, repressive, male-dominated world, though the actual men in their lives are weak, preening mediocrities. Though this is a highly specific period piece, Shirley’s claustrophobia resonates loudly in 2020, especially because Decker renders it with inimitable panache. Showing the same caustic wit that has made her such a literary sensation, Shirley dismisses the interloper: “Betty, Debby, Kathy. (In Sundance Film Festival.) • Shirley is in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from 30 October. With Elisabeth Moss, Odessa Young, Michael Stuhlbarg, Logan Lerman. Rose, cooking and cleaning as her belly swells, stands in archetypal contrast to Shirley, a female Faust who has purchased her artistic power at enormous cost. Sometimes it can get confusing, but I … But he is a mean-minded snipe, pettily convulsed with jealousy at Shirley’s new intimacy with Rose. Together, Moss and Stuhlbarg epitomise a very horrible masculine and feminine mystique. But that’s the mood the director Josephine Decker wants to conjure in Shirley—one where even a mundane home has a distinct air of spookiness. Instead, Decker and Moss approach Jackson as if she were a character in her own fiction, which is to say as an object of pity, terror, fascination and awe rather than straightforward sympathy. Jackson, the subject of an excellent recent biography by Ruth Franklin, is much too interesting to succumb to the dull, sentimental moralizing of mainstream moviemaking. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. “The world is too cruel to girls,” Shirley reminds Rose, and in that phrase encapsulates the underlying feminist mentality that guides her and the movie. Or do they? It also, incidentally, holds out the possibility that we might find out what happened to that missing woman. Stanley clearly wants to ruin young Fred’s career to assert his own alpha dominance, and Shirley wants to befriend Rose parasitically, using her as a psychological crash test dummy for the new novel she’s writing, speculating about the inner life of a young Bennington student who has recently disappeared. To Rose, Shirley is an immediately alluring but frightening figure. Decker — who’s been repeatedly drawn to experimental, semi-hallucinatory stories of what misogynistic midcentury shrinks once dubbed “hysteria” — has been doing this kind of subconsciousness spelunking with all her features, most recently in the funhouse maze that was “Madeline’s Madeline.” Whereas those slippery, deconstructivist thrillers felt as if they had been cobbled together in editing, “Shirley” benefits from Decker’s fragmented, broken-mirror approach, as well as the fact Sarah Gubbins wrote such a great script (adapted from Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel) to use as her template. As Shirley’s most trusted editor and critic, Stanley desperately wants his wife to return to her writing, but he might not approve of the manuscript she’s undertaken — it will ultimately become Jackson’s 1951 genre novel “Hangsaman.” Her inspiration is the case of “a disappearing college girl,” which she enlists Rose to help her investigate. Yet there's a lot more going on than that, especially for poor Rose. Adapted from Susan Scarf Merrell's book, the movie introduces Jackson (Moss) as a near-bedridden wreck, living in Vermont with her English professor husband Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) when the aforementioned fictional couple lands at their doorstep. That work was an examination of how the artistic give-and-take between a teenage girl and her drama teacher turns vampiric, as the mentor practically feeds off her student’s experiences. The two of them, as it happens, are on their way to Bennington, Vt., where Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) lives with her husband, the literary critic and campus lech Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg). But we’re heading for something more gooey and emollient. Shirley mixes fact and fiction as it explores the life of the writer best known for the short story "The Lottery." The relationship between Shirley and Rose is more complex—both parties are mesmerized by the positives and negatives they see in each other. All rights reserved. The connection between Shirley's writing and her mental state permeate the movie and affect the characters in interesting ways. The movie is set in the early 1950s, after the publication of her acclaimed short story “The Lottery” has made her a minor cause célèbre in the literary world, and it follows her as she tries to write her 1951 novel, Hangsaman. Rose is instantly drawn to Shirley. Beset with agoraphobia and a host of other unnamed conditions (the most obvious being a virulent case of writer’s block) that leave her looking like a haggard mental patient — or worse, a witch — Shirley seems to be having a good day when the couple arrives.
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