Shirley
Shirley Jackson was a writer unafraid to stare into darkness. By the end of her life, the author of the unsetting short story “The Lottery” and the chilling novel The Haunting of Hill House was a prisoner of anxiety and agoraphobia; alcohol and cigarettes helped her to an early death in 1965. She was only 48.
Shirley—a feature film just released on Hulu—is ostensibly about Jackson but the true protagonist, whom we meet in the opening scene and evolves as a character, is the fictional Rose (Odessa Young). Rose is a young wife, recently wed to Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman), a teaching assistant with tenure aspirations. Fred and Rose arrive at Bennington College, Vermont, where he is to be mentored by Jackson’s husband, Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg). The Nemsers stay in the professor’s vine-covered cottage; a household fraught with undisguised tension.
Shirley is drawn from the novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, who set the story in 1964 when Jackson was at the end. Director Josephine Drecker pushed the scenario back to 1948 when Jackson was still a young, emerging writer, a move that casts some doubt on the depiction’s veracity. Was the author really so unhappily unstable so early on? Drecker is enamored of arty tics, blurry closeups of faces and house flies, the cottage’s cracked ceiling. However, some of her visual tactics work well. Rose’s initial timidity is pictured as she peers through the narrow vertical aperture between the door and door jamb of Jackson’s bedroom. She’s repelled but fascinated by the rude, maniacal woman whose words she admires.
The film rises on the strength of its cast. Elisabeth Moss endows Jackson with a haunted visage; the sharp glint of frustrated intelligence shines through her haunted eyes. With her dark witchy undertow, Jackson seems to know things. Her occasionally glimpsed black cat, her tarot cards, deepen the twilight mood. Moss’ Jackson can be catatonic and frantic, hunched over her typewriter like a mad troll and hurling balled-up pages of failed text at the wall in disgust.
Her husband, Hyman, is charming and condescending, broad in erudition, despising the mediocrity of academic place-seekers such as Fred. While supportive of his wife’s writing (at a time when many men were intimated by competitive women), he’s also an irrepressible philanderer. The dank intellectualism and cruel mind games of their household, the damaged insularity, revisits Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? While Hyman and Jackson are stuck, circling within their emotional cul de sac, Rose has yet to become herself. When she arrives at Bennington, Rose is the good wife patiently bearing all burdens, including housework in the cottage and Hyman’s unwanted attentions. She gradually establishes a bond with Jackson, becoming inspiration to the writer who inspires her in turn to imagine herself free from a stultifying life—a scenario that makes more sense in the novel’s 1964 (the cusp of the women’s movement) than in the film’s 1948.
