Shirley (Preview)
Reviewed by Megan Feeney

Produced by Christine Vachon, David Hinojosa, Sue Naegle, Sarah Gubbins, Jeffrey Soros, Simon Horsman, and Elisabeth H. Moss; directed by Josephine Decker; written by Sarah Gubbins, based on the novel by Susan Scarf Merrell; cinematography by Sturla Brandth Grøvlen; production design by Sue Chan; art direction by Kirby Feagan; music by Tamar-kali; costume design by Amela Baksic; starring Elisabeth Moss, Odessa Young, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Logan Lerman. Color, 107 min. A Neon release.

“Motherhood comes with a price, you know,” Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) warns her pregnant houseguest Rose (Odessa Young) in Shirley. If this were another kind of film, say a standard-fare feminist biopic, this line would encapsulate—perhaps a bit too tidily—the film’s critique of midcentury America’s constraining gender norms that pressed women to subjugate Self to the demands of marriage and family. But Shirley is willfully untidy—just like its title character, the American Gothic writer Shirley Jackson, on whose life and work it is loosely based, and in keeping with director Josephine Decker’s previous psychological thrillers, Butter on the Latch (2013), Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (2014), and Madeline’s Madeline (2018). Bewitchingly, Shirley smudges and stirs: real and imagined, character and narrator, sociopolitical critique and existential terror. Everything is double-edged, at least. Thus, by the time Shirley utters this line, the viewer senses that it both contains the typical feminist critique of the “cult of domesticity,” and exceeds it. Shirley is talking to Rose and to herself. She is talking about Rose’s imminent motherhood and about the psychic toll of being an Artist, particularly a female one. Willing as Shirley is to pay it, she is lamenting the cost of “origin-ality,” as her husband demands of Art—of laboring into being one’s singular vision.

Shirley is no biopic, standard-fare or otherwise. Instead of using Ruth Franklin’s 2016 biography of Shirley Jackson as its source, playwright-turned-scenarist Sarah Gubbins uses Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel of the same title, which invented Rose Nemser and her intense relationship with a fictionalized version of The Author. Indeed, at first glance, the film doesn’t even make Shirley its protagonist, but rather Rose. It opens, in the late summer of 1948, as Rose and her new husband Fred (Logan Lerman) travel by train to Bennington, Vermont, home of the all-female Bennington College; there, they will spend their first year of marriage boarding with Shirley and her husband, literary critic and professor Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), from whom Fred is to learn the art of teaching—and philandering. 

Clattering toward this fate, Rose reads Jackson’s famous short story “The Lottery” in The New Yorker. A surreal and chilling tale of provincial American conformism that ends with a woman’s stoning, it won Jackson critical acclaim—placing her alongside American Gothic masters such as Hawthorne, Poe, and Faulkner—and social ostracization in small-town Vermont, whose citizens could recognize when they were being pilloried. (The film confirms this with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Bennington boys throwing stones.) “The Lottery” arouses Rose, to subversive action; she initiates sex with Fred in the train’s bathroom. Afterward, Rose tidies herself in the mirror, the first of many in the film. She buttons up her bridely blouse and checks to see if her Self matches the Image. The composed Rose—hair in place and red lipstick perfectly applied—then walks through Bennington, slightly behind Fred. She wears a demure yellow skirt and carries a yellow cake. In Shirley, yellow is the color of domesticity (in wardrobe, wall color, and food, especially eggs), while burgundy red represents resistance to it (excepting in the aforementioned lipstick). 

The picture-perfect newlywed Nemsers arrive midparty at “the Hyman House,” and are swept into its disorienting orbit. Shirley and Stanley are intellectual and progressive, quite apart from Bennington’s provincialism. They believe in racial integration (another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot) and open marriage, or at least Stanley does. On the front  (porch, a red-lipped student drapes herself over the good professor. Inside, where Rose goes looking, Shirley holds court, a cigarette in one hand, scotch in the other. She regales a circle of admirers with the genesis of “The Lottery,” sprung whole from her brain in two hours’ labor, born of her disdain for “all of Humanity.” (Her writing as easy and misanthropic are both essential lies.) Stanley enters to praise his wife’s talent, characterizing himself as a predator of it, “hunt[ing] her down to make her marry me.” This is our introduction to Stanley and Shirley’s toxic dynamic, crackling with sublimated resentment and codependency, which Gubbins writes brilliantly, borrowing from the couple’s archived correspondence and acknowledging her debt to Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Rose is entranced. When Shirley takes her leave (rudely), Rose follows to introduce her-Self as a worthy comrade; after all, Rose deeply understood “The Lottery,” which made her “feel thrillingly horrible.” Shirley is unimpressed, not least of all because she detects, with a witchy sixth sense, that Rose is pregnant, and thereby consigned to domesticity. To her, Rose is just another empty-headed “pretty” “girl,” to use the real-life Shirley Jackson’s own favored pejoratives. Or just another red-lipped pinup doll, to use Decker’s images, rendered in evocative dream sequences of Bennington girls. “Betty, Debbie, Cathy. You’re all the same to me,” Shirley concludes. The next sequence confirms this assessment as Rose sits in on the first day of Stanley’s “Myth and Folklore” class, immersed in a red-lipped sea, giggling with admiration at The Professor’s idiosyncratic “Authority.”…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 4