Shirley Is a Fascinating Film Experiment

Shirley isn’t an average biopic, or really a biopic at all. Instead, director Josephine Decker and screenwriter Sarah Gubbins—adapting from Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel of the same name—tell a fictionalized story about master storyteller Shirley Jackson, who captivated and disturbed audiences with her short stories (most famously “The Lottery”) and experimental, psychological novels like The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and, central to this movie, Hangsaman.

NEON Films

Like many of the author’s novels, the film is set in a specific slice of time: the late 1940s, shortly after the publication of “The Lottery.” And like many of those same novels, the story is primarily told through the point of view of a young woman: here it’s Rose Nemser (Odessa Young), recently married to Fred (Logan Lerman), a newly minted literature PhD hired to assist Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) in his teaching at Bennington College. Rose is excited by Hyman’s invitation for the two of them to stay with him and his wife, Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss), for a few weeks while they look for a place.

Unfortunately, life with Shirley is not the inspirational idyll Rose imagined; Shirley herself is abrasive and reclusive, and on their second day Stanley “asks” Rose if she wouldn’t mind helping out around the house, as Shirley has “bouts” where she just “can’t keep up with the household.” Despite initial hostility between Shirley and Rose, their relationship gradually becomes intimate and complex, as Rose begins to help her draft what will become her second published novel, Hangsaman, the story of a young woman who goes to college and experiences a mental break with reality. In particular, the two are engrossed by the disappearance of Bennington College student Paula Welden, who recently walked into the woods and never came out.

The movie itself is spellbinding and engaging from the start, though it really gathers steam when Shirley and Rose begin working together. Meal scenes featuring the quartet of Shirley, Stanley, Rose, and Fred stretch out and then abruptly cut the tension with the cat-and-mouse energy with which Shirley and Stanley seem to be toying with the Nemsers. For the most part, the movie takes place in Shirley and Stanley’s large, somewhat rundown home. Large houses in various stages of rundown recur in Jackson’s work, and the movie calls attention to the house’s physical, almost participatory, presence with scene transitions that often make you feel as though two characters are in the same room, only for the camera to move and reveal that the viewer has moved without even realizing it. The dreamlike way in which the Nemsers find themselves staying indefinitely, even through the birth of their child, evokes the trapped feeling many of Jackson’s characters experience.

Elisabeth Moss’s performance is as electric and complicated as her subject, embodying Jackson’s many angles at the knife’s edge between explosion and collapse. Michael Stuhlbarg’s portrayal of Stanley Hyman leans confidently into Hyman’s outgoing, professorial skeeziness, but the performance is at its best in concert with Moss’s (as, many feel, was the case with Stanley’s own writing). Between the two of them they maintain a dynamic, striking energy, fueled by desire and delight in each other’s wit and intelligence and poisoned by the sexual and professional envy that frequently plagued them. Likewise, Odessa Young’s performance as Rose gains momentum and complexity as the charge of her connection with Shirley increases. Rose is arguably the true protagonist of the movie; with the exception of a few private scenes between Shirley and Stanley, almost everything happens through her eyes and for her reaction, including the way the viewer approaches Shirley as brilliant, difficult, and magnetic.

One of the major struggles when adapting Shirley Jackson to screen (whether her work or herself) is how to visually portray the way her sentences are written to weld the internal with the sensory. In Shirley, biographical faithfulness is sacrificed for that fusion, and it certainly is more engaging than its 21st-century contemporaries. However, I still came away with the feeling that there was something missing. The plot requires a bit of timeline fudging concerning where Jackson and Hyman lived and when, but this is much less distracting than the complete absence of Jackson and Hyman’s children, of which there were three while she was writing Hangsaman. (Biographical information in this article comes from Ruth Franklin’s Jackson biography, A Rather Haunted Life.) The movie never makes clear whether in this story the children simply don’t exist or are so absent as to be irrelevant, but neither option bears much resemblance to reality. Jackson was a caring, involved parent, which impacted both the content of her writing—including humorous memoirs about her family life—and the way it happened in stolen hours while taking care of her children and home.

The movie seems to be looking at Shirley Jackson through a kaleidoscope borrowed from Jackson herself, to mostly thrilling result, but would Jackson have excluded her experience of mothering from that kaleidoscope? Then again, there’s an inherent and admirable boldness in making Jackson a character in a Jackson-esque story. The Shirley Jackson of this movie is no more the real Jackson than the protagonist of Hangsaman is the real Paula Welden, and the film’s emphasis on the complex ties between narrative and reality bring about an emotionally resonant conclusion. In the end, what could be a better tribute to Jackson and her work than a story that defies a single, definitive interpretation?