HINDSIGHT IS 2020: SHIRLEY (2020) ** ½

Right from the opening scene you can tell Shirley won’t be just another ordinary biopic.  When Rose (Odessa Young, from the new TV version of The Stand) reads Shirley Jackson’s macabre short story “The Lottery” on a train, it gets her so hot and bothered that she just has to bang her boyfriend (Logan Lerman) in an empty car.  Now, if you’ve ever read “The Lottery”, you know that it isn’t exactly a Harlequin romance novel. 

Anyway, the couple go to stay with Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) and her snobby intellectual husband (Michael Stuhlbarg) on the condition Rose becomes their housemaid.  At first, they get on like oil and water, but eventually Shirley takes a shine to Rose, slowly letting her in on her darker nature that she hides from the world.  However, not only is Shirley using her for the model of the main character in her first novel; she is also making her the target of psychological warfare, which her husband is all too eager to engage in as well. 

Moss is locked in.  She’s much more effective here than she was in grossly overrated The Invisible Man as she dials down her usual hysterics and turns in an unpredictable and edgy performance.  Imagine a crazy cat lady meets Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and that sort of paints the picture.  She makes for a good foil for Young, whose character is tempted by Shirley’s outsider qualities.  The scene where Shirley gleefully invites her to eat possibly poisonous mushrooms is especially memorable. 

Produced by Martin Scorsese, Shirley is ultimately one of those movies that is more marinade than meat.  It offers a snapshot of Jackson’s life and shows that she probably had a screw or two loose.  It also spends as much time glorifying her eccentricities as it does pointing out her contradictions. 

The problem is the movie runs in all sorts of directions at once and never really settles on one approach.  The forbidden love story angle between Rose and Shirley works the best.  The scenes where the screenplay tries to infuse the picture with the same gothic horror touch Jackson gave her work are less effective.  The blurring of fact and fiction is a good idea, but it’s just another narrative trick for the film to juggle, and it’s frankly one it can’t quite handle. 

There’s also an intriguing subplot of Jackson treating her new housekeeper and lover as a character in her own book, bending her and breaking her just because she can.  However, it never truly commits to making Shirley an out-and-out villain, and because of that, the final act winds up being sort of muddled.  The performances are strong enough to keep you watching, but the film itself is far from haunting.