Josephine Decker’s films are often misguidedly referred to as “experimental.” That word should be reserved for movies made by scientists in their laboratories; a better word for certain unusual movies is “non-narrative,” but it doesn’t fit here—Decker’s films all have clear, coherent stories. On the other hand, Decker’s new film, “Shirley,” her fourth feature (which opens Friday, online), a refracted bio-pic of Shirley Jackson, is indeed experimental—it’s an audacious director’s experiment in commercial filmmaking, and a successful one. It’s Decker’s first feature made with major stars, her first one produced within the industry, her first with a script that she didn’t write—her first contact with the norms and demands of the industry. Yet it’s also a movie of scathing inward turbulence that, if it doesn’t quite match Decker’s other films in comprehensive originality, nonetheless expands the commercial cinema with new tones, moods, and styles of a sort that few other filmmakers have brought.
Working with a script by Sarah Gubbins (which, in turn, is based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell), “Shirley” stars Elisabeth Moss as Shirley Jackson, in a narrowly focussed biographical episode that’s centered on the composition of her 1951 novel “Hangsaman,” the story of the disappearance of a female college student. Jackson based it loosely on the real-life disappearance of Paula Jean Welden, a student at Bennington College, where Jackson’s husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, taught. “Shirley” co-stars Michael Stuhlbarg as Hyman, and it dramatizes the emotional, artistic, and sexual fury that binds the couple even as it threatens to rupture their bond.
The drama is built around another character, though, a fictional one: Rose Nemser (Odessa Young), a young woman who arrives at Bennington with her husband, Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman). A newly minted Ph.D., Fred has been recruited by Stanley as a postgraduate fellow, and Rose will be a student at the college. (Unbeknownst to Fred, she’s pregnant.) Instead, through Stanley’s manipulations, Rose becomes something of a housekeeper in the Jackson-Hyman household, as well as Shirley’s unofficial research assistant, her friend, her confidante, her object of desire—and her living model for the protagonist of “Hangsaman”—as the Nemsers get drawn into the family’s vortex of emotional chaos and their marriage begins to fray. (Despite the hint of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “Shirley” is after something else altogether—the artist’s inner life.)
“Shirley” is a peculiar sort of romantic melodrama. It captures the authentic high-energy bond between Shirley and Stanley (speaking, of course, of the characters), the volatile convergence and codependence of two prodigious creators—but also the two women’s ferocious bond—including the consciousness-raising that Rose gets from Shirley, a free-thinking and free-speaking woman with a major independent career who is nonetheless a trapped and desperate wife. When the Nemsers arrive at the Jackson house—an old, well-appointed, spacious, and ivy-covered one near the Bennington campus—they find it in a state of artificial exuberance. Stanley is hosting a party on the porch, dancing gleefully, and greeting the Nemsers with a florid grandeur (his default public manner) that belies the truth of the situation. Shirley is parked inside on a sofa, enduring agoraphobic anxiety, forced to endure a swarm of guests while unable to even set foot out the door and onto the porch, and unable to write, even as her sudden fame, from the publication in The New Yorker earlier that year of her story “The Lottery,” is mounting.
As befits a movie about a great writer and a great critic, Gubbins’s script is sharply, aphoristically literary—it’s among the few movies about writers that offers writers’ dialogue that’s persuasively imaginative. Decker, in turn, elicits impulsive, even reckless performances from Moss and Stuhlbarg that capture the dangerous power of thought in action (as well as its sophisticated and lacerating humor). Much of that danger is on view from the start, in the pugnacious impact that the older couple have on the naïve and innocent Nemsers, who get targeted, separately and together, by Shirley, from the moment of their arrival, in a sort of emotional hazing.
Stanley takes himself to be something of Shirley’s coach, trainer, and editor. He’s also a master manipulator, who takes advantage of Fred’s dependence on him for career advancement to get Rose to put her studies aside and do the housework—cooking, cleaning, shopping, and waiting on Shirley—so that he can help get Shirley back into writing shape. Instead, while the two men are on campus all day, Rose is alone at the house with Shirley—and the writer’s idea for the book emerges as a kind of spontaneous inspiration, on the sight of Rose, that’s also a sort of telepathic mind-meld.
Stanley himself has a hand in the shock treatment the Nemsers receive. Forcing Shirley to the dinner table for first meal that Rose prepares, he tells her, “I didn’t ask you to behave at the table.” Shirley doesn’t behave; she stirs up trouble between the Nemsers and drives them away from the table—and then, alone with Stanley, discloses her plans for the novel, which instantly becomes a source of contention between them, bound up with Stanley’s own infidelities. (The movie hints that they have an open marriage, mainly as a one-way street for Stanley’s affairs.) Yet, as Shirley becomes both increasingly inspired and enabled by Rose’s presence, she drives Stanley away from his usual role as her writing coach and editor—she is, in effect, breaking free at an enormous price, testing and even imperilling her already conflict-torn marriage to discover and develop a new creative power. Yet Shirley also owes a crucial part of that new power to Rose, who both offers a crucial insight into the disappearance of Paula and becomes Shirley’s model for the novel’s protagonist (who is also played by Young in the writer’s fantasy sequences). In the process, Rose begins to fight to maintain her place in Shirley’s life (leading to a more complex and troubled view of two women’s artist-model relationship than the one in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”).
Decker’s work with “Shirley” invites comparison to another filmmaker whose career expanded upon contact with grand-scale melodrama: Douglas Sirk, whose first major commercial success came with the 1954 film “Magnificent Obsession.” It was based on a script that was handed to Sirk by a studio producer, but, as in “Shirley,” its power came less from the sharpness of the writing than from what he did with it. Sirk said (in interviews with Jon Halliday published as “Sirk on Sirk”), “One of the foremost things of picture-making, I think, is to bend your material to your style and your purpose. A director is really a story-bender. . . . You have to write with the camera.”
In “Shirley,” Decker writes with the camera. The cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s roving, probing, darting, intensely active camera work creates a kind of fluid substance of time that, rather than merely depicting or even inflecting the drama, becomes the drama—the oceanic current of passion on which the action surfaces. “Shirley” is the third of Decker’s features (the others are “Butter on the Latch” and “Madeline’s Madeline”) that involve female artists, and “Shirley” similarly relies on a repertory of methods—hallucinatory images, disjunctive editing (by David Barker), collage-like soundtracks in which music (by Tamar-kali, along with archival recordings), sound effects, and voices leave drama behind to suggest states of mind, fantasy and dream sequences, and performances of an eruptive emotional violence—that fuse the struggle of creation and the struggles of life, bitter external practicalities and raging internal clamor (including the terror and the destructive force of mental illness).
