Shirley (2020)

Film: Shirley (2020)
Stars: Elisabeth Moss, Michael Stuhlbarg, Logan Lerman, Odessa Young
Director: Josephine Decker
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

All right, so we're continuing our week-long look at the movies of 2020 with a second film that played at Sundance (the first was Monday's Palm Springs), Shirley.  The movie, purchased by Neon, seemed destined for the sort of critically-acclaimed (but brief) summer run that such movies oftentimes get.  The film got raves, and falls into the weird glut of movies that Elisabeth Moss has been choosing to excel in since Mad Men went off the air.  She's taken on key roles in mainstream flicks (Us, The Kitchen, The Invisible Man), but by-and-large she's just been acing work in really low-key independent cinema, in some cases movies you might not have even have heard of despite her celebrity (Mad to Be Normal, Light of My Life, The Free World, Chuck).  Here, she plays what could be one of her most memorable roles as legendary horror writer Shirley Jackson.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is told over the course of one school year.  We have a young couple Rose (Young) and Fred Nesser (Lerman), who are staying at Bennington College with Stanley Hyman (Stuhlbarg) and his wife Shirley Jackson, who has recently written the critically-acclaimed (but deeply controversial) short story "The Lottery."  Jackson doesn't conform to the role of a professor's wife naturally.  She's abrupt, curt (frequently crossing into rude), and discusses sex in a way that other people simply don't do in the 1950's.  She starts a strange friendship with the pregnant Rose, messing with her head, but still seemingly liking her in the only way Shirley can express...all the while tormenting herself with a new novel that she refuses to let her husband read.  As the film unfolds, we begin to see the complicated dynamic between Shirley & Stanley, and the way that the Nessers' relationship covers for a less than idyllic marriage.

This is not an easy film, and certainly not a straight-forward biopic.  It takes place for a just a year, while Jackson is writing one of her novels Hangasaman (a book that is celebrated, but not something that you could instantly name-check in the same way you could something like "The Lottery").  Hangsaman was based on the real-life disappearance of Paula Jean Welden, who attended Bennington college and who the real-life Jackson doesn't appear to have met, but her husband may have when she attended the school.  This murderous nature of a real-life crime hangs over the film in the way that we see fictionalized versions of real-people, and Jackson's paranoia & fits of mad genius leave us questioning everything we see.

This generally works, though it's hard-to-watch.  The movie is doused in heat, a sticky sweat over all of the actors.  The film frequently shows the Nessers in some throw of sexual desire (though it's worth noting that this is not an equal opportunity nudity situation, as Young is forced to be far more exposed in these scenes than the more-famous Lerman), and it always feels hot, and not in the double entendre way.  The movie perhaps doesn't always have a firm enough script to carry its plotting, and some of its twists feel a bit arbitrary (either they were telegraphed an hour earlier or feel like an unnecessary distraction), but it's watchable thanks to Moss in the central role.  She's extraordinary as Jackson, finding menace with a playfulness that makes her Shirley feel like a demonic, overly-talented child.  She plays her scenes knowing that she wants things from others, but confident that she's better than everyone (and has the talent to prove it).  It's the kind of work that when Moss inevitably starts scoring frequent Oscar nominations we're going to point to as evidence that she could pull off such a performance all along (like Julianne Moore in Safe).