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Shirley
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Josephine Decker’s film is a fantasia based on details
from the married life of Shirley Jackson, author of The Haunting of Hill House (adapted several times for film and TV),
and a classic “unruly woman” who defied convention, respectability and
politeness. Jackson is played with gusto by Elisabeth Moss, who is the best
thing in it.
It’s the 1950s, so Shirley’s academic husband Stanley
(Michael Stuhlbarg) teaches blues music as “myth and folklore” to students at
Bennington College in Vermont (Camille Paglia has often publicly reminisced
about her contentious early teaching days there). As well, a new, permissive
morality fights the old, sedimented ways of the local community. Shirley
herself struggles with crippling depression.
Into this dysfunctional but colourful household come
young scholar Fred (Logan Lerman) and his feisty, pregnant wife Rose (Odessa
Young) – who becomes Shirley’s assistant, and then much more.
Decker slices and dices the generic moods here:
biopic, psychological thriller, horror, visionary art film, avant-garde
extrapolation. There are fleeting allusions to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975), Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963) and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965).
How Jackson’s texts actually ever managed to be
successfully conveyed to a typewritten manuscript remains a fogged-up Divine
Mystery on par with the extravagant biopic depictions of William Burroughs at
work (?) in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991).
Decker’s by-now recognisable cinematic style is haptic: seeing as touching, the
camera-eye as fingers of a hand. Dreamlike images abound, but even ordinary
scenes have a hallucinatory air. The genealogy of this style can be traced back
to certain celebrated passages of Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) – itself avowedly strongly influenced by the work of Terrence Malick –
but pushed further into experimental modes of making and perceiving, especially
as these exist within the diverse tradition of women’s
cinema.
Yet Decker inherits Campion’s central problem: successfully
integrating style with story (and fictional world) in a feature-length format.
Across the long haul of her recent features Madeline’s Madeline (2018), Shirley and The Sky is Everywhere (2022) – not to mention the lesser efforts of
various imitators/fellow-travellers like Benh Zeitlin in the unbearable Wendy (2020) – this dreamy, floating
mania can become exasperating, and less expressive than it intends to be. What
some people complain of in Malick’s run of features since To the Wonder (2013), I complain of in Decker & co.
In the grandly textured tale of Shirley, where fiction and reality (too) often change places, Moss’
remarkable performance at least provides a solid anchor.
© Adrian Martin September 2020 / May 2022 |
