As Two Women Battle It Out in Shirley, Josephine Decker Proves She Isn't Afraid of Virginia Woolf--or Shirley Jackson

Elisabeth Moss as Shirley Jackson / Neon

SHIRLEY
(Josephine Decker, US, 2020, 106 minutes) 






"That story was the most remarkable story I'd ever read. I knew I was going to marry the woman who wrote it."
--Stanley Hyman, Shirley's husband, on "The Lottery"

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As Elisabeth Moss plays her, Shirley Jackson was kind of an awful person.

Josephine Decker's quasi-fictional portrait of the writer begins as a young couple in the bloom of love prepares to meet Shirley (Moss made to look older, much like Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and her husband, professor and literary critic Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg).

Decker's sun-blasted opening recalls the first sentence of Jackson's 1948 New Yorker story, "The Lottery," which ends as vividly as it begins: "The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green." From that bright beginning, Jackson plunges into darker territory, inspiring nightmarish entertainments about seemingly pleasant communities from Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man to Ari Aster's Midsommar.

The Nemsers (Logan Lerman and Odessa Young) / Neon

On the trip to North Bennington, Rose Nemser (Odessa Young, terrific) reads the story, and longs for Shirley to like her. At their first meeting, she shares her enthusiasm with the author, but Shirley couldn't be bothered. These fawning young women, her words and attitude suggest, are all the same.

Fred (Logan Lerman, whose casting seems particularly apt in light of his naïve college student in Philip Roth adaptation Indignation) has traveled to Vermont to teach, while Rose plans to audit classes, a sign that she wants to broaden her mind, but not to become something more than a helpmate.

If his wife is initially dismissive of the pretty young woman, Stanley takes a shine to her, and asks if she'd like to help out around the house in exchange for room and board as Shirley is subject to "moods." As it turns out, Shirley hasn't left the house in two months. Instead of expressing gratitude for Rose's assistance, Shirley needles her at every turn. It doesn't help that she can tell Rose is pregnant, even though she hasn't begun to show.

Shirley is hardly idle. She's just begun work on a novel inspired by the case of a missing young woman (presumably 1951's Hangsaman, though Sarah Gubbins' script doesn't say). Stanley doubts she has the stamina to finish anything longer than a short story, but she won't be deterred.

"Can I trust you?," asks Shirley / Neon

With the men teaching at Bennington College (Fred serves as Stanley's assistant), the women circle each other warily. Despite Shirley's hostility, Rose doesn't crumple. If anything, she starts to see Shirley as more of a challenge than an obstacle. Soon she isn't just taking care of her, but running errands and doing research.

In the course of her combing through archival records, Rose finds out that the missing woman was pregnant. As in Decker's enigmatic 2013 feature debut, Butter on the Latch, she blurs the line between fantasy and reality, and it isn't always clear what Shirley is actually experiencing, what's she's imagining, and what her novel's protagonist might have experienced.

It's tempting to assume that she's suffering from depression or that she might have lost a child--or both--hence the preoccupation with pregnancy and the resentment of the young, healthy, and outwardly happy Rose, except by the end, it's clear that Decker had different intentions in mind (though not mentioned in the film, Shirley and Stanley had four kids).

If Decker's first two features, including 2014's Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, ended in murder, Shirley ends with a departure that could be seen as a murder of a kind. Once Rose crosses over from housekeeper to collaborator, her pristine façade becomes disheveled. Her hair becomes looser, her face shinier, her outfits less put-together--her perfectly-applied lipstick disappears. She also develops an odd relationship with food, just as the real-life Shirley struggled with her weight, including an addiction to diet pills.

Stanley, whose attentions to Rose have an uncomfortably sexual cast, becomes jealous that she knows more about Shirley's project than he does. The relationship recalls 2018's Madeline’s Madeline in which a charismatic director (Molly Parker) gets to know an actor (Helene Howard) in a way her mother (Miranda July) doesn't. In Decker’s third and finest film, July gives a heartbreaking performance as a woman who feels like a third wheel as an outsider swoops in and steals her identity, leaving her unmoored. And that’s Rose to Stanley: the person who has taken his place as his wife's companion and confidant, except July's Regina was sympathetic in ways that the controlling, womanizing Stanley isn't.

As Rose becomes more like Shirley, Fred becomes more like Stanley. Neither of these things is necessarily a positive, because Stanley is a lousy husband and Shirley is a nasty piece of work. Decker finds a way to tie all these threads together that stands in opposition to her first two features, because it isn't a tragedy. Nor is it as celebratory as Madeline's Madeline, which ends in a burst of cathartic, Beau Travail-like exuberance. In this case, things are simply put right. If it all makes sense once you realize her endgame, I still felt unsatisfied, because it's a sleight-of-hand story. What you think you're seeing, what you think is happening is more internal than external.

The real Shirley  / Erich Hartmann / Magnum Photos

Furthermore, Moss gives it her all, as she always does, but she can't quite get to the heart of her character. We're told what makes her tick, but I never really felt it. There's something both admirable and frustrating in the way Decker's women are never especially heroic or even all that nice. That doesn't mean they're bad, and there's no reason they should be likable, but she's worked too hard to turn us against Shirley. If Gubbins' writing had the wit and snap of Edward Albee or Harold Pinter, she and Stanley might make for perversely enjoyable company, but they're more of a drag than intended, despite a few good lines, like Stanley's take on Fred, "Terrifically competent? There's no excuse for that!" To his mind, it's better to be an utter failure.

It's to the credit of Odessa Young (Assassination Nation) that she provides a consistently compelling focal point, because Rose changes with every scene to the extent that she's a completely different person by the conclusion.

As for Shirley Jackson, she was only 48 when she died in 1965 after years of declining health (she published her final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in 1962). If Josephine Decker had stuck to the facts of her life rather than adapting a work of fiction, Susan Scarf Merrell's 2014 Shirley: A Novel, her fourth feature might have been a far bleaker affair. As it stands, Shirley fails to fully capture Jackson's brilliance--or even Moss's--even as it attempts to emulate the style of one of her famously spooky stories, but if it inspires greater interest in the writer and the filmmaker, I'd call that a win.

 

Support two great local film organizations and stream Shirley by way of Northwest Film Forum at this link or SIFF at this one for only $5.99.