MOVIE REVIEW
“SHIRLEY”
Rated R. At the Coolidge Corner and Somerville Virtual Cinemas and other digital platforms.
Grade: A-
Obviously riffing off the template of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and Mike Nichols’ famous 1966 film adaptation of it featuring legendary turns by then married Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, comes “Shirley.”
Featuring a sublime Elisabeth Moss in the title role and Odessa Young of “Assassination Nation” as the young professor’s wife who falls under the spell of the deeply troubled, hugely talented great woman, the film is director Josephine Decker’s even better follow-up to her somewhat twee, critically acclaimed 2018 effort “Madeline’s Madeline.”
At the first dinner for Jackson and her blues aficionado husband professor Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Rose (Young) and her politely ambitious grad student-professor husband Fred Nemser (a not entirely convincing Logan Lerman), witchy Shirley announces that newly married Rose is pregnant and wonders aloud about the child’s paternity.
Yes, she is that kind of person. Earlier, she kept a party spellbound at her and Stanley’s expansive home in Vermont, where Stanley teaches literature at Bennington to an awful lot of young women. In a prelude set on a train, Rose reads “The Lottery,” which leaves her oddly aroused, and then she and Fred have sex in a compartment.
At first, Shirley doesn’t like Rose, who is hired as cook and housekeeper because Shirley spends so much time hungover. But then as Shirley, who is as mad as the pattern on her 1960s-era blouse, begins work on a (fictitious) novel about a Bennington student named Paula Welden who disappeared and whose face can be seen on weathered fliers on campus, Shirley and Rose become friends. Later, things get Sapphic.
At the same time, Fred is making progress at Bennington. A professorship might be offered. He spends his nights drinking at the Shakespeare Club. A cocktail party turns into a tribal initiation rite.
A lot of the film is shot with a hand-held camera in the style of low-budget indie productions. But the style, coupled with Jackson’s agoraphobia, gives the film, adapted by Sarah Gubbins (“I Love Dick”) from a 2014 novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, a shut-in quality perfect for a story about the author of “The Haunting of Hill House.” It is safe to say Jackson’s haunted houses are all in her head.
Every now and then the score by Tamar-kali (“The Lie”) starts to spin out of control. Puffing cigarettes, taking large gulps of Scotch and typing away, Moss is the artist as conduit for spiritual infestations eager to get from her overheated brain to the page by way of her writing arm before her lungs and liver give out (Jackson died at 48). Meanwhile, her wise, unfaithful husband stands just out of throwing range, offering to edit (Hyman did indeed edit Jackson’s work).
At one point, Shirley says to Rose, “Let’s hope it’s a boy. The world is too cruel to girls.”
Most films of this genre spend too much time on the all-too-trite personal life and neglect the art. “Shirley” blends the two so well, you cannot differentiate them. For Shirley, Rose becomes Paula, who was last seen on a trail head, where she had gone hiking. Yes, this haunting and engrossing film will take us back to those woods for the ending.
(“Shirley” contains profanity, nudity and disturbing images.)
"artist" - Google News
June 05, 2020 at 05:20PM
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‘Shirley’ portrait of the artist as a haunted woman - Boston Herald
"artist" - Google News
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