Shirley

Elisabeth Moss & Michael Stuhlbarg are terrific actors & deliver very strong performances in this uneven film. The script is all over the place, the tone if off and the film can't decide if it wants to be an edgy biopic or another Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? I'm a big fan of Shirley Jackson's writing & wanted to like this movie but found it so sloppily made and un-involving, it was a disappointment.

"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.

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.

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.

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.