Review: Shirley Is an Astonishingly Frenzied Portrait of Creation and Madness

Every scene in Josephine Decker’s film operates at a maximum frenzy fraught with subtext.

Shirley
Photo: Neon

Even the most daring or imaginative films can get bogged down by moments of unnecessary exposition. By contrast, Josephine Decker’s Shirley doesn’t take any encounter as a given, as every scene operates at a maximum frenzy fraught with subtext—with sexual tension, bitterness, class and gender resentment, and acidic comedy that springs from the intersection of all of the aforementioned pressures. At any moment in this astonishing, frustrating film, we’re alternately in and out of the characters’ wavelengths, and continually forced to reorient our perceptions of the various relationships driving the narrative. Next to Decker’s films, the rigid staging of most cinematic conversations feels prim.

There are no ordinary images in Shirley. Decker and cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen give the film a hazy look that suggests an act of recollection, in which autumnal colors bleed together while certain objects and portions of settings and actors pristinely peek through the frame. Meanwhile, the camera is often moving, as in Decker’s previous films, switching between point-of-view shots and compositions in which characters look directly at us, or homing in on close-ups that allow for other characters to enter scenes unnoticed, paving the way for jarring surprises. Individually, none of these devices is original to Decker, but she’s united them with a fluidity and a sensual puckishness that’s all her own.

Shirley and Decker’s prior film, Madeline’s Madeline, both concern the porous boundaries separating creativity from madness and collaboration from exploitation. Adapted by screenwriter Sarah Gubbins from the 2014 novel of the same name by Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley focuses on iconic short story author and novelist Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) and her life with her husband, professor and critic Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), in North Bennington, Vermont. Hyman is tenured at Bennington College, and he’s invited a newlywed couple, Fred (Logan Lerman) and Rose (Odessa Young), to live with him and Shirley for a period of time. Over several months, the two couples play escalating mind games as Shirley attempts to write a novel about the disappearance of a local college girl.

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Shirley and Stanley and Rose and Fred often suggest the same couple from two different periods of time (before and after success), and Decker’s hallucinatory style occasionally leaves us wondering if the film is building toward this revelation. After all, Shirley and Stanley have what Fred at the very least wants: acclaim and status. Fred thinks he’s going to be Stanley’s apprentice and eventual successor, while Stanley seems to regard him as an errand boy. (Stanley also smugly recruits Rose as the housekeeper, or Shirley’s minder.)

Rose’s motivations are murkier: She’s pregnant and initially seems to enjoy playing housewife, until we learn that she quit college for Fred and the baby. It gradually comes to light that Shirley, already legendary for “The Lottery,” and who carries far more weight with Stanley than Rose appears to with Fred, also has something that Rose longs: respect. On the other hand, the romance between Rose and Fred feels kinder, more idealized, than the manipulative parlor games played by Shirley and Stanley, though this juxtaposition is ironic as well. Stanley and Shirley’s overt cruelty toward one another suggests truthfulness, a willingness to honor one another’s eccentricities, while Rose and Fred play into courtly tropes.

Shirley recalls Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Phantom Thread. Like the former, it features elaborate, self-consciously performative scenes of drunk and talented characters airing their resentments, turning their outbursts into a kind of weird and potentially cathartic poetry. And like the latter, it’s concerned with the atmosphere that a potentially disturbed artist must cultivate in order to create. The comparison to the Paul Thomas Anderson film may be particularly instructive, as Shirley also derives its emotional suspense by gradually revealing to viewers the “rules of the house.” In Phantom Thread, we learn that a young innocent is capable of ruthless adaptation that benefits her artist-lover’s need for domination while bettering her own station. In Shirley, we learn the extent to which each couple is manipulating the other, and how Shirley’s creative drive is also fueled by a form of role play.

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The notion of role play is affirmed by the film’s stylized performances. Moss and Stuhlbarg deliver their lines as if they were stanzas, and the actors’ vocal precision is complemented by piercing physical gestures that suggest periods and commas. Stuhlbarg has never before been this gloriously full of himself, and he has a particularly evocative moment in which Stanley disparages Fred’s dissertation, stretching the word “derivative” out as if it were taffy. In another scene, Stanley coaxes the agoraphobic, alcoholic Shirley out of bed with a cigarette, tossing it to her like a snack. In such moments, we’re allowed to feel the intimacy as well as the cruelty of this relationship, qualities which are essentially inseparable. (Shirley needs Stanley to be a jerk so she can rebel against him, as this is the source of her inspiration—a notion that’s also reminiscent of Phantom Thread.)

However, Moss also underscores the potential limitations of Decker’s florid excess, rendering Shirley climactically unhinged from the outset, riding high on the character’s flamboyant oddness, as she did with her roles in Her Smell and The Invisible Man. The former film had tonal contrast, allowing Moss to eventually ease up on the melodramatics and offer moments of delicate beauty. In The Invisible Man and Shirley, Moss puts on a hell of a show, but you’re conscious of the work behind her performance. Shirley’s always “on,” either drunk, enraged, manipulative, stumbling, glinting, castigating whoever’s around, or all of the above, allowing Moss to continually run at fever pitch; she’s the mad hatter as master of ceremonies, and she grows rather repetitive as the film itself comes to spin in circles. This self-consciousness is justified by the film’s final reveal, and by this conception of Shirley as a character, but it grows stifling nevertheless. Moss, like Shirley in general, is always in your face.

As with Madeline’s Madeline, there’s sentimentality running underneath Shirley’s bravura, as this is another film that glorifies madness as a tool of an artist’s trade—a way-too-common notion in cinema that cheapens the pain of madness itself. Decker implicitly presents Shirley’s neuroses as a weapon against sexism, as a refusal to merely be an administrator’s wife, which means that we’re introduced to the usual clichés of hypocritical women who bought into the system that Shirley fights. Shirley also, of course, serves as a warning to Rose, whom she conflates with the woman driving her novel, another person dashed by patriarchy.

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Jackson’s writing isn’t this tidy. Eleanor, the lonely heart at the center of The Haunting of Hill House, isn’t a thesis marker, but a miserable, uncertain, talented, and intelligent person who’s potentially without a purpose, at least to herself; her pain is wrenching, while Moss renders Shirley’s craziness powerful and affirming. If there was more than just a hint of Eleanor’s vulnerability in Moss’s Shirley, this might have been an unruly classic. Decker is too mighty an artist to go in for trendy girl power. In fact, Decker, with her ferocious subjective poetry, could probably make a brilliant adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House.

Score: 
 Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Michael Stuhlbarg, Logan Lerman, Odessa Young, Molly Fahey, Adelind Horan, Allen McCullough, Edward O’Blenis  Director: Josephine Decker  Screenwriter: Sarah Gubbins  Distributor: Neon  Running Time: 107 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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