Shirley

I kept watching this movie to see if it would get any better. It didn't. I only gave it a five because for the most part the acting was good.

Young married couple Rose (Odessa Young) and Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman) arrive at Bennington College to start his job. She is taken with famous author Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss). Shirley's husband Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) hires the young couple to keep their home.

The film is able to capture the instability of the various relationships but I had trouble zeroing in on the stakes for most of the movie. It's not until Shirley tells Rose the truth that some stakes are injected. Before that, the two marriages have different levels of dysfunction but it only threatens to reach other levels of dysfunction. For me, the movie meanders for the first two thirds and then blows down the door in the last act. There are better ways to build up the tension and the drama in a smoother way.

In the early 1960's, without cellphones to distract their enclosed academic environment, Bennington English professor Stanley Hymen (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his genius fiction writer wife, Shirley Jackson (Elizabeth Moss), take in an academic couple, Fred (Logan Lerman), Stanley's new teaching assistant, and his wife, Rose (Odessa Young). Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is in the air of this literary icon biopic as booze works its magic on the older couple, who no longer need much to invigorate them than bottles of gin. Psychosexual tension abounds.

Shirley is the name of the film, and academic angst is the game.

This fictional take is based on Shirley by Susan Scarf Merrell and adapted by Sarah Gubbins. Whether or not Jackson will publish her scary stories is really just a McGuffin in this dark tale of sex and power in the outposts of the academy. She labors over a true story about Paula, a co-ed who vanished on campus.

In a time of female repression, Rose works her way around Stanley, becoming "little wifey" (Betty Friedan had not yet arrived). Fred, well, he's handsome enough to be busy with co-eds and working his way into a position in this prestigious department while the camera takes to roving at a frenetic pace.

As ambitions begin to collide, cinematographer Sturla Brandth sometimes too quickly moves the camera among them with a shadowing that seems to discourage our learning too much, too close. Rose and Fred capture the gothic ambivalence and danger of the household as they assess for Shirley about her famous short story "The Lottery": "That's creepy," says Fred; "It's terrific," says Shirley. True of the household itself.

Although this domestic drama is tightly wound like the little house it is set in, much is said about marriage, status, words, the creative process, and rivalry than first appears in the rancor and suspicions. Put your thinking cap on; class is in session, and it happens to be fun.

Just.... Strange. Kind of a weird train wreck to watch. Elisabeth Moss is a great actress and delivers as usual, but it's a little hard to get on board with the story, because you want the "good" characters to stand up for themselves and the "bad" characters are just pretty mean. Upon further recent (this is supposed to be based on the Haunting of Hill House author Shirley Jackson), there is no evidence that the real Shirley Jackson was so evil. This movie version of Shirley tears people down for sport. It leaves a bad taste in my life when famous figures are skewered in movies that promote themselves as biopics or "based on the life of" or "inspired by a true story." Skip this movie and read a Shirley Jackson novel instead!

As other reviews mentioned, it's a slow burn with not much happening. It's really much better depicted as a slow drama, certainly not a thriller. The characters are very unlikeable and while that's often written by design, it does very little to drive the plot forward.