Josephine Decker is no stranger to experimental filmmaking. Her 2018 improvised exhumation of identity and the creative prospect of self, Madeline’s Madeline, was the toast of the Sundance and Indie Spirit set, and while not quite a mainstream breakthrough, it certainly gave way to Decker as a talent worth keeping tabs on. On its face, Shirley almost seems like the same kind of minor backslide seen in the career trajectory of Marielle Heller, who followed her fabulous The Diary of a Teenage Girl with the much more moderately ordinary Can You Ever Forgive Me?. Entering into the turgid territory of the biopic is always a worrying sign, a genre the basically approaches the apple pie of modern filmmaking. In the standard set, one can predict the rising and falling action of these films before you ever see them, and even those that break the mold do so in a way that titillates a viewer just enough.
Thankfully, Shirley has a lot working in its favor. Specifically, Decker herself. Much like when Todd Haynes brings you an off-kilter Bob Dylan biopic, Decker brings a similar surgical knife to the subject matter that’s equally fitting for the creative output of its subject. Secondly, the film operates in a place more suitably defined as biographical fiction, based on the 2014 Susan Scarf Merrell novel of the same name. And last, she cast the “queen of peak TV” herself Elisabeth Moss in the title role. And while Moss isn’t always a pure indicator of quality, it’s certainly gives way to a heck of a headstart.
The film, much like the novel, takes the famous horror and mystery novelist (she of The Haunting of Hill House fame), Shirley Jackson (Moss) and husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), and casts aside much of their familial trappings and boils them both down to a barer essence, with Jackson as the infinitely talented writer consistently struggling with anxiety and depression, and Hyman as the overbearing and often lecherous university professor. Hyman forces Jackson to play co-host of their parties, provides line by line notes of her work, and basically plays all of the typical notes of a gaslit relationship as he attempts to rise her from bed. But, as Decker astutely recognizes, relationships are complex things, even ones that are heavily inflected by emotional abuse. And rather than concentrating on the idea of one talented woman trapped as her central thesis, the filmmaker attunes her eye more on the impact a particular culture (in this case, the one on the campus in which Hyman works) has on all of those who come within its orbit.
This idea gains further clarity as chart the journey of Fred (Logan Lerman) and Rose Nemser (Odessa Young), a young married pair that comes to live with Jackson and Hyman, as Fred has taken a position as a teaching assistant to Hyman. While Fred is slowly but surely ingratiated into life at Bennington College, including its more unsavory aspects of teacher-student relations, Rose is tasked with taking over housekeeping duties, which gives her an opportunity to create a rapport with Jackson, who is quickly struck with the inspiration to pen a novel (in this case, her 1951 novel Hangsaman), and Rose becomes her research assistant and they dig into the real-life disappearance of a freshman at Bennington.
While all of this may sound fairly straightforward, its Decker’s deft hand with the material that sparks Shirley with so much vitality. Her treatment of Bennington as its own character practically, or really, a malevolent force, is worthy of Jackson’s own novels. And how it molds and twists Fred into a younger reflection of Hyman, while noting its own impact on the once assured lifestyle of Rose, plays like fiction echoing back into fact, and as these same elements play into the subject of Jackson’s novel to be, this same influencing set of factors is actually impacting three different women – connecting them all through a culture of neglect and chains of psychological dispossession. As Shirley unfolds in front of you, it’s as if the puzzle pieces are slowly being put into place, particularly in terms of its subject matter’s creative process. Though much of the film’s latter half underscores Rose’s own sexual awakening, Shirley is particularly at its most riveting as the book that is being researched continues to take shape and the face of the disappeared young woman in question becomes clearer and identifiable.
With terrific performances up front by the always excellent Moss and Stuhlbarg, and a fresh injection of energy through a talented and fearless filmmaker, Shirley grabs this moribund genre by the throat and emphasizes the need to ingrain these projects with actual personality and creative fingerprint of the very subjects they idolize.