Shirley

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.

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!

"Shirley" takes place soon after the publication of Jackson's piece of short fiction, "The Lottery", published in 1948. While both the novel and film adaptation of "Shirley" document aspects of the writer's life, the central narrative of Rose and Fred Nemser, a couple who moves into the writer's Bennington home, is completely fictional.

Elisabeth Moss who also was a producer stars as Shirley Jackson, rude, crude and inappropriate most times but successful as an author of horror stories. I can't say I really enjoyed this movie, Shirley and her husband were not very nice people. But Moss does a wonderful job in the role and it is good to know something about her life.

I watched it at home on DVD from my public library, my wife skipped.

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.

I really don't get it. Director Josephine Decker supposedly wants her film to illuminate the life and work of author Shirley Jackson. The actors spent time researching and immersing themselves in the lives of Shirley and of Stanley Hyman. But the film's story is only ever vaguely representative of their lives and personalities. Huge liberties have been taken. To give just one example, this Shirley and Stanley are childless, and seemingly tortured about it, whereas the real Shirley and Stanley had four children. In the end, one can only wonder what the point of this film is. It's no kind of tribute and it neither illuminates, nor explores Jackson's life and work when there's only a passing resemblance to the known facts. Decker actually seems more interested in spinning a story about the creative process, and how all-consuming, twisted and destructive it can be. That's all very well. But Decker's notions have little to nothing to do with Jackson. So why not just admit that her story is fictional? Pretending that it is some kind of biography, however loosely based on facts, just seems dishonest and ultimately exploitative. Ethical issues aside, it also has to be said that Decker's exploration of her Shirley's creative process involves long stretches of extreme tedium, some seriously contrived dramatic scenarios and a great deal of shameless scenery-chewing, albeit by a couple of very fine actors. Given that the melodrama revolves around an academic, his frumpy wife and their young house guests (and attendant sexual tensions) there are whole scenes that play like an uncomfortable homage / parody of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? If only it were even half as amusing and engaging.