Shirley (2020)review. A film that drifts in and out of consciousness.
This is an imagined bio film of gothic writer Shirley Jackson best known for her short story The Lotter and novels such as The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). It is not alone in telling an imagined story based on a real person’s life, Ammonite did similar with Mary Anning.
To bring the story to life we have Shirley played by Elizabeth Moss all frump, glasses with acid drops of dialogue with her husband Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg). He infuses Hyman with the right mix of comic pretentiousness and menace. The world they inhabit is like an American dacha for intellectuals, housed in a university, Shirley on the fringes of academia with Hyman fully in its orbit. The home, university life has a semblance of biographical truth as Shirley and Hyman did live in Vermont near Bennington College were Hyman taught. The fiction comes in the shape of young couple Fred (Logan Lerman) a junior professor looking for a leg up the academic ladder from Hyman. Accompanying him is his seductively beautiful, pregnant young wife Rose (Odessa Young). Like a horror film this young couple enter the house of Shirley. The newlyweds meet Shirley and Hyman who are the throes of a marriage that is familiar to both. Their marriage is just starting, Shirley and Stanley’s are in their combative phase. It would be fair to say this is not a biographical film it is instead I think an impressionist version a particular time in her life and tells the story in the gothic style of a Shirley Jackson story. The film is based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell using fiction to tell a story about Shirley Jackson.
What are Fred and Rose to Shirley? well one way to answer this is that they are material for Shirley’s next novel. As Shirley is struggling to write her next book, Hangsaman (1951), a gothic horror story set in academia about student Natalie Waite, who is mentally disintegrates after enrolling in a liberal arts college. It is based on the based on the real-life disappearance of a Paula Jean Welden who disappeared while walking on Vermont’s Long Trail hiking route or was murdered. It remains an unsolved mystery and it stoked the interest of Shirley Jackson
The film drifts in and out of consciousness as it moves from verbal warfare in the home and university to more haunting dreamy sequences that tap into Shirley Jacksons horror stories. The first half of the film is the domestic with Rose being drawn closer to Shirley whose interest in her is macabre especially when we think about the book she is writing. Stanley, whose way with words mean any offer is a good one persuades Rose to be the housekeeper. Pot and pan washing for Rose while her husband works and moves in the claustrophobic world of academia. Luckily this gives time for Shirley and Rose to interact more.
The film then moves into a dreamier phase in the second half going in and out of consciousness as the story Shirley is writing blurs into film. It felt to me almost like two different films with the first part verbal, domestic and centred on academia. The second half we leave reality behind and enter a Shirley Jackson writing world were the pages she writes are on screen. Inviting us to think who is Rose? Does she act as a proxy for the girl who went missing the murdered girl Jean Welden? You could put those questions aside to just bath in the dreamy, woozy visual world Josephine Decker creates in the second half of the film, it’s good. One scene on a cliff that looks out on to great big open space looks to me like the characters are going to move forward into a Zelda open world adventure game. The film is an anti-biographical film which I think is the fashion now. Birth, school, work, death type of biographical films are two a penny. Better to take a sample from a writer’s life, dissolve it in another person’s imagination and turn it into a film.
