[Film Review] Shirley (2020)

Title: Shirley

Year: 2020 

Country: USA

Language: English

Genre: Biography, Drama, Thriller

Director: Josephine Decker

Screenwriter: Sarah Gubbins

based on the novel by Susan Scarf Merrell 

Music: Tamar-kali

Cinematography: Sturla Brandth Grøvlen

Editor: David Barker

Cast:

Elisabeth Moss

Odessa Young

Michael Stuhlbarg

Logan Lerman 

Paul O’Brien

Orlagh Cassidy

Victoria Pedretti 

Robert Wuhl 

Rating: 7.6/10

“Women like Shirley don’t have friends”, the said Shirley is famed American horror/mystery writer Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), played by Elisabeth Moss with an unflattering, matronly transmogrification. While the film’s title is SHIRLEY, actually there are two leads of equal weight in US indie practitioner Josephine Decker’s unorthodox biopic, which is adapted from Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel, essentially comprises four characters, Shirley, her husband Stanley Edgar Hyman (Stuhlbarg), and another couple (totally fictionalized), the newlyweds Fred and Rose Nemser (Lerma and Young), who are invited to temporarily stay under the same roof, as Fred starts his new job as a professor at Bennington College, Vermont, where Stanley works.

The dynamism among two couples with generational shift is acutely reflected in the duo-play between Shirley and her co-lead Rose, the through-line of SHIRLEY also prominently lies in Rose’s slow subsumption into Shirley’s deliberate, push-pull mind-fuck, while the latter is shut in, strains to write her latest novel about a disappeared girl in the campus. Shirley sees an impressionable Rose as an amenable asset whom she can manipulate to her own advantage, whereas Rose is enthralled to finally get the attraction from the surly, reclusive writer (after a bumpy start), and submits herself almost completely to their latent sapphic development elicited by Shirley. At the same time, Rose’s life is also wrong-footed by “the angel in the house” role imposed on her and the complacency of her matrimony soon dissolves when hard truth starts surfacing.

SHIRLEY is fascinating work from Decker, who calibrates an experimental, atmospheric visual syntax that beauteously heightens all the minutiae with chromatic clarity and allure, tactilely imbuing a vintage glow on everything and everyone captured by her camera, be it a scenic long shot or a close-up on Moss’ zitty visage. Decker also collates the intimate character study closely with Tamar-kali’s subtly subversive score that throbs, hums and jaggedly hints a nefarious, murky undertow that is subliminally unsettling.

In the titular role, Moss dives into the embodiment with assured perverseness, the film is the antithesis of a hagiography, and she sinks her teeth into a writer’s messy process of creativity relentlessly, her Shirley Jackson emanates almost a meta-fictional connotation pertaining to a sort of vague malevolence that is exemplar among the intelligentsia, which many a filmmaker before Decker fails to express eloquently, she must firmly believe that inside every soul of a true genius, there must be some distorted, shadowy part that prowls behind the closed door, waiting to maraud, to feed on whatever sustenance (incentive, inspiration, enlightenment, or a lightening bolt!) that is vital to their exceptional creation, and Moss is a terrific enabler to that purpose, and by the same token, although in a lesser extent, so is Stuhlbarg’s confident portrayal of an officious Hyman “If it was awful, it would’ve been exciting, but terrifically competent, there is no excuse for that.”, the toxicity of their folie à deux is appalling, but also beguilingly understandable.

Rose, on the other hand, is the canary in a coal mine (with a very literal cue on show), expectant to infiltrate a celebrity’s inner circles, her naivety, sensuality and growing infatuation all come into existence courtesy to Young’s bang-up ebullience and expressiveness. In the end, it is Rose’s resounding rite of passage that puts a positive spin to the denouement’s ambivalence, SHIRLEY is not your usual biopic boilerplate, it is an impeccable flight about the peculiar symbiosis of two women.

referential entries: Alex Ross Perry’s QUEEN OF EARTH (2015, 7.3/10); Marielle Heller’s CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? (2018, 8.0/10).