Review: Don't Call Me 'Shirley'
Shirley has something rotting at its core that hasn’t quite reached its surface — like one of those brooding flowers that fantastically blooms once per decade. As you crowd around it for your view, a stench creeps in from the dazzling petals. It wafts over you in waves until it can’t be ignored any longer. You’ve forgotten about it's beauty and your full attention is now devoted to that odor. I mean this as a compliment.
“It made me feel thrillingly horrible” — the first reaction to author Shirley Jackson’s (Elisabeth Moss) work she does not immediately brush off . It is said by Rose Nemser (Odessa Young) during her and her husband Fred’s (Logan Lerman) first night in the home of Shirley and her husband Professor Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg). The two couples make up the majority of screen time in this summer’s psychological thriller. In the film’s opening, Rose almost wordlessly devours Jackson’s short story The Lottery, a twisted tale that we are told left the staff of The New Yorker reviled, but this exchange is the first time we’ve heard Rose articulate what struck her about the piece. Rose’s choice of “thrillingly horrible” is able to catch Shirley’s withering stare just long enough that we, as the audience, hold our breaths before Shirley ultimately saunters away humming. With this gripping moment, director Josephine Decker and writer Sarah Gubbins lay out just one of the strands in a complex entanglements of dynamics that comprise Shirley and the rot at its core. As is quickly apparent as Rose spends time with her, we sense that Shirley believes part of that rot is weak men.
“The world is too cruel to girls," laments Shirley late into the film’s runtime. It is easy to understand why she thinks so. Women in Shirley are valued in relation to what they can provide their counterpart. Shirley’s career, while reputable, is at a standstill while she has writer’s block. This seems to particularly frustrate her husband who is hinted to be capitalizing on Shirley’s acclaim. Her marriage is largely sexless, manipulative, and sporadically malice-filled, and while honest, Stanley only seems to support her writing and not her emotions. Rose herself drops out of school to raise her child so that her husband Fred can continue his professorial aspirations. Most other depictions of women in Shirley are students trying to catch the eye of a professor. This current of misogyny is rarely embodied on screen directly but is nonetheless pervasive to the point where it grabs your full attention. And the same can be said about Shirley itself.
While Shirley Jackson was a real talented author, the movie doesn’t seem to mind if you forget it’s based on a real life figure. Shirley is more narrow in focus and less concerned with accuracies to Jackson’s life than most biopics. Decker instead keeps the film’s cards close to its chest, resting the viewing experience mainly on the superb sound design, electric ensemble, and gripping tone. She distances everything as far away from biopic template as the story will allow, employing a similar blurred line between visions and reality that was found in her under-seen 2017 film Madeline’s Madeline. Much could be said about this dense film, but I think I will summarize my very positive experience with Shirley by this:
It was thrillingly horrible.
