Shirley (2020)

Sometimes, a fictional story is the most interesting way of digging into an author's life.


Like Josephine Decker's previous Madeline Madeline, I found this fascinatingly infuriating at times while also absolutely compelling and dreamlike/nightmarish. Go in not expecting a biopic or even a slice of life of Shirley Jackson, rather a riffing on her life with Stanley Hyman at the time Jackson was writing Hangsaman (the real-life and never-solved disappearance of Paula Jean Welden, whose disappearance inspired Hangsaman, hangs over this movie like a shroud). It's an odd, lovely movie that's also venomous as hell and in how it uses the background of the real Shirley and Stanley and their relationship to great effect, as a new professor and his wife Rose come to stay for a while and Rose cares for Stanley. I've not read the novel this is based on so I can't say if this is a choice there as well, but in this version the two oldest Hyman children don't exist and I think that's an interesting narrative choice to streamline this household to Shirley and Stanley and their relationship games; I kept thinking about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, as they circle each other and make both loving and laser-focused sniping comments at each other.

But really, this is all about Elisabeth Moss as Shirley and Odessa Young as Rose. Moss is quite rightly getting a ton of praise for this performance, but Young deserves a lot as well for how effective she is as Rose falls into Shirley's life and does a lot of growing up in this poisonous environment of a late '40s college department, with the sniping and the boozing and the sleeping around.

Where does this movie actually end up? I'm...not sure. I definitely feel I should watch that last 20 minutes again and see if I have a definitive answer, but I'm not sure I do. And maybe that's the point, like in Shirley Jackson's work, that sometimes there simply isn't a definitive answer and sometimes the ghosts you see are just your own.

★★★★ 1/2

2020 - Written by Sarah Gubbins (based on the novel by Susan Scarf Merrell) and directed by Josephine Decker

Side note: if you're at all interested in the real story of Shirley Jackson, the excellent biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin, is very worth your time.