An Elisabeth Moss feat
Shirley Jackson drama carried by extraordinary actor of the moment
Elisabeth Moss is on a run of extraordinary performances (“The Invisible Man,” “Her Smell”), and if you’ve been missing them, it’s a good time to start catching up. In her latest, “Shirley,” available on video on demand and at select drivein theaters, she plays the San Franciscoborn horror writer Shirley Jackson, and there’s no taking your eyes off her.
Things can change — things always change — but in 2020, Moss is the most interesting person acting in American movies.
“Shirley” gives her lots to play with. As presented here, Jackson is a wreck, a substanceabusing, phobic mess, cruel and selfpitying, who is afraid to leave the house. She also has flashes of intuitive genius. She meets a woman and immediately knows that she’s pregnant. (“So, Rose,” she says. “Tell us about your shotgun wedding.”)
Based on the novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, “Shirley” takes place in a small town in Vermont, where Shirley stays at home and writes, and her husband, Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg), teaches a course in American folk music. A young couple arrives to stay with them for a few days, but they stay longer. Stanley gets the idea that the wife, Rose (Odessa Young), should act as both maid and cook, and because the husband, a burgeoning scholar, is depending on Stanley for his advancement, the young couple has little choice but to agree.
What follows is a kind of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?” situation, albeit less fun, with a horrible middleaged couple paired with a fresh, young couple who you know are going to be just as horrible in 20 years, unless someone does something to alter the trajectory.
This is where Stuhlbarg’s role is key. We expect some poor, downtrodden husband, catering to the demands of a neurotic, vicious, angry wife, but as we soon see, he is as big a monster as she is — a vain and preening professor, a sneaky manipulator, a sexual predator and a backstabbing schemer. Remember the saintly professor Stuhlbarg played in “Call Me by Your Name”? It’s as if he’s playing the same role again, only this time he gets to turn over all the cards.
The action is mainly seen through the eyes of Rose, who spends her days slaving in the house and slowly getting to know Shirley, who is imperious yet needy. Moss takes a small element in the script — Shirley’s intuitive capacity — and builds the character on that. She is always clocking everyone, gauging their responses and revealing little of what she sees. When she does speak, it’s always for a reason, either to seduce or wound.
There’s a problem with the movie’s basic strategy, however. In “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?,” the story is all about the older couple — the lessinteresting younger couple is just there to catalyze the older couple’s ordeal. But in “Shirley,” Stanley and Shirley are fixed in their ways. They’re monstrous, but they’re not in crisis. They’re presented as more or less fixed entities. Thus, the dramatic movement must, instead, come from Rose and her scholar husband.
But who cares about them? Nobody who will ever see “Shirley.”
Unfortunately, a lot of screen time is lavished on scenes of Rose sitting around thinking and wondering, feeling herself being pulled into Shirley’s orbit, feeling herself becoming Shirley’s slave. To the movie’s credit, it at least makes Rose’s situation complicated. Shirley is a calculating and devouring beast, but she’s not all bad. She has a way of telling people truths they need to know and telling them 20 years ahead of when they would have figured them out on their own.
So “Shirley” is slow and uneventful, but intermittently interesting, and Moss is great. In the end, what tips “Shirley” into the realm of recommendation is that Moss will be the only thing anyone remembers of the movie. That means that even if it’s only an OK experience, it should last as a good memory.