Shirley movie review: Elisabeth Moss enthrals in probing anti-biopic of a tortured genius

Language: English Shirley Jackson is having a moment, and it’s a long-awaited, well-deserved one. Once overlooked by the literary establishment, her stories of small-town stonings and haunted hill houses are now getting feature and series-length adaptations. Betty Friedan, who spoke of modern women having “suffered a schizophrenic split” in The Feminine Mystique, too was critical of Shirley. She accused, unjustly, the horror writer of purveying the myth of the happy housewife, while ignoring the reality of the unhappy careerist. The reality was: trying to sync the seemingly incompatible identities of wife and writer had been an enduring struggle for Shirley. That struggle is the subject of Josephine Decker’s anti-biopic Shirley. Elisabeth Moss slips into the skin of the famed horror writer, whose co-dependent relationship with a young woman becomes key to unlocking the next novel from her imagination. The young woman, Rose (Odessa Young), arrives in Vermont with her husband Fred (Logan Lerman), who is to be the new teaching assistant to Shirley’s husband Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg). When the newlyweds move into their home, Rose finds herself reduced to the role of a maid. A fan of Shirley’s writing, she weathers the writer’s initial coldness before turning muse for her story, Hangsaman.   [caption id=“attachment_9377331” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Elisabeth Moss and Odessa Young in Shirley[/caption] The two women realise they’re more alike than different when Rose becomes pregnant, and Shirley becomes stuck in her own agonising gestation period of the new novel. Although supportive of Shirley’s career, Stanley’s open infidelities and control over every aspect of her life further add to her misery. In Shirley and Rose’s shared discontent, the film grounds an exploration of female desire and emancipation, but through the prism of the artistic process. Decker proposes desire and emancipation are correlated. In the opening scene, having just finished Shirley’s short story The Lottery (which ends in ritual sacrifice) on the train journey to Vermont, Rose’s very next instinct is to escort her husband into the toilet for sex. Eroticism and mortality become intermingled in Freud-appropriate fashion. Rose and Fred are of course fictional, the plot wholly invented. Decker takes the novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, and turns it into a curious interplay between reality and fantasy. The lines separating the two, made deliberately fuzzy and porous, help better explore an enigmatic character like Shirley. All writers, more so the enigmatic ones, already live as characters in the fantasies of their readers, if not in their stories. Through this metanarrative, Decker suggests creating art and living it are often one and the same. [caption id=“attachment_9377341” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Michael Stuhlbarg and Elisabeth Moss in Shirley[/caption] The more time Rose spends with Shirley, the more her life bleeds into the writer’s work. Decker’s images mirror this feeling of osmosis happening in both directions. The handheld camera wobbles, defocuses and refocuses as the hallucinatory gaze transfigures narrative into a manic experience of emotions. What stirs Shirley’s imagination is linked to her drives and curiosities. And with a troubled character in a dysfunctional setting, it’s like entering a house of distorting mirrors where character and identity, foreground and background are constantly changing. The window lighting too creates a psychological sense of space. There’s a beauty beyond lucidity in an incoherent narrative thread punctuated by dreamy interludes. Spellbound in the hazy limbo of Shirley’s psychodrama, it becomes near impossible not only to separate the art from the artist, but take it out of its prevailing social context. For Rose, Shirley personifies liberation from her confines as a young wife and soon-to-be mother. With her husband spending most of his time at work, Rose finds the value of being truly seen in Shirley’s company. For Shirley, Rose becomes a temporary cure-all for all her despair. The young tenant even percolates into the novel Shirley is writing, as her imagination overlaps with her obsession over the unsolved disappearance of a local girl.   [caption id=“attachment_9377361” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Shirley and Rose[/caption] Natalie Waite in Hangsaman is stifled by her domineering father, and comes unhinged much like Shirley. Elizabeth Richmond in The Bird’s Nest is kept on a tight rein by her aunt, and suffers from insomnia and migraine, symptoms Shirley herself experienced while writing it. Moss probes Shirley’s fragile mental state to convey the acute misery that besieges women (and women artists) subject to oppressive scrutiny. In Moss’s presence, Young too comes alive with more purpose shining in Rose’s eyes. Together, they perform a duet of haunting opacity.   No doubt Shirley lived “a rather haunted life”, as Ruth Franklin suggested in her 2016 biography. Besides depression and alcohol abuse, she suffered through several bouts of agoraphobia before her premature death at the age of 48. It’s why a lot of her stories were set in houses which became prisons of their characters’ anxieties. Eleanor Vance speaks of being consumed by the house in The Haunting of Hill House, until the two become one and the same. The Sundial’s Fanny Halloran tries to wait out the apocalypse by shutting herself inside her manor house. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Merricat Blackwood barricades herself in her home, and never steps beyond the front door. Paradoxically, in their desire for autonomy, they all retreat into themselves, into prisons of their own making. Decker adds to Shirley’s own sense of isolation by entirely omitting her four children as characters in the movie.   Decker’s inspired choice to employ a psychological horror framework lends the events an air of ambiguity that helps build the tension to nerve-jangling highs. Like she did with Madeline’s Madeline, she displays a mastery of the cinematic medium in a story that defies easy and precise articulation. In fact, Decker’s portrait of the creative process as an atmospheric thriller is subversively spooky in a way Shirley herself would approve. Shirley is streaming on MUBI. Rating: ****