Shirley

Elizabeth Moss looking dissipated as Shirley

Josephine Decker's Shirley fills me with so many contradictory impulses that I am not sure I have come to grips with the film, but that is a good thing. Sarah Grubbins' screenplay, based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, is ostensibly about writer Shirley Jackson, picturing her as a troubled, drunken and isolated genius living with her husband, Bennington Professor Stanley Hyman in the 1950s. Hyman is portrayed as a comic satyr whose love and respect for Jackson coexists with his feckless womanizing. A callow TA , Fred (Logan Lerman) and his pregnant wife, Rose (Odessa Young), arrive on campus and are roped by Stanley into sharing a house, primarily so Rose can clean up after and watch the erratic Shirley. Shirley and Rose bond, particularly over the disappearance of a coed which provides fuel for Shirley's writing. Their bond becomes erotically charged, but Shirley's demons drive them apart.

Shirley is not a biopic. Murky in its plotting and photography, the film defies rational analysis because it represents an attempt to portray Jackson's life as if it were a Shirley Jackson story: a nightmare vision that seems to spring from the unconscious. The action is mostly limited to the dingy shared house linking the work to the sick abode genre of horror found in Poe, King and many others. A primordial ooze of Dionysian abandon overwhelms any sense of Apollonian architecture. Shirley purposefully gurgles red wine over the couch of a rival. Stanley is introduced as Dionysus himself. his bald pate garlanded by ivy. The campus coeds are portrayed as sinisterly knowing maenads. 

The film has a chthonic pull. Tarot cards, fertility offerings, black cats, murder ballads and mushrooms all appear to signal the preternatural. The fungus is secretly shared by Shirley and Rose in a daft sex magick rite. Jackson describes herself as a witch (she did write a book about the Salem witches) and is shown having Cassandra like visions. She transmits this hidden wisdom to her acolyte Rose, but also channels Rose's youthful vigor for her own ends. This is the ambivalent result of experience. At film's end, Rose is even mimicking Shirley's sardonic pose and hauteur while vowing never again to be a submissive little "wifey". Another disaffected sistah raging against the patriarchy.

This is but one aspect of the script that somewhat diminishes the power and reach of Jackson's prose. Jackson is a feminist writer, but that is not all she is. Like a number of other 20th century writers (Kafka, Faulkner, O'Connor, Beckett, Camus, etc., etc.), Jackson was addressing the plight of a mankind seemingly abandoned by God. A world with no moral order and no hope of divine intervention underpins "The Lottery", We Have Always Lived in the Castle and most of her corpus. Misogyny is merely one of the torments humans inflict upon each other. The screenplay, at times, simplifies the agony of Jackson's world. When Shirley urges Rose not to fling herself off a cliff, the result is a too literal summation of Jackson's work as a skirting of the abyss. 

A clunky opening sequence, in which Rose's reading of "The Lottery" inspires her to seduce her husband in an incredibly oversized railcar washroom, begs incredulity. "The Lottery" is designed to elicit a response, but lust seems an odd one. A lot doesn't add up in Shirley, but, as in Madeline's Madeline, Ms. Decker is able to powerfully portray the give and take of symbiotic relationships. Only Logan Lerman, of the four principle actors, is not up to the demands of his role. He doesn't even have the chops to portray a shallow character. Odessa Young, as Rose, suffers when she is in proximity to Mr. Lerman, but when interacting with Michael Stuhlbarg and Elizabeth Moss she shows she can do the heavy lifting. 

Stuhlbarg has, with his casting here and in A Serious Man, nailed down the role of the Jewish academic in our lifetime. Stanley's joie de vivre allows Stuhlbarg to show a little more range than he did in the Coen brothers feature. I have yet to see him deliver a subpar performance and particularly value his Arnold Rothstein in Boardwalk Empire. Moss is nonpareil. She succeeds in making Jackson both dislikeable and fascinating. Shirley has its faults, but it gave me much to chew on. I look forward to seeing what more Ms. Decker has to offer us.