Monthly Archives: October 2020

  • Shirley

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Josephine Decker (2020)

    Where would films about writers be without writer’s block?   The title character of Josephine Decker’s latest is the famed novelist and author of short stories Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss).  Her husband, Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor of literature at Bennington College in Vermont, invites Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman), a junior colleague hoping for tenure, and his wife, Rose (Odessa Young), to the Hymans’ home.  Their housekeeper has recently quit.  Mentally fragile Shirley isn’t up to managing the place on her own, and needs time to concentrate on the novel she’s struggling to get underway.  As soon as the young couple arrives, Stanley proposes they move in, with Rose taking over domestic chores.  The Nemsers, puzzled but flattered, agree to the proposal.  They don’t realise that Rose, who is pregnant, won’t only shop and cook.  By giving substance and clarity to the character of the new novel’s protagonist, she will also cure Shirley Jackson’s block.

    Using real people as grist to the literary mill, regardless of how this impacts on them, is another common feature of writerly behaviour on the screen (ditto Shirley’s chain-smoking and alcohol intake).  But the exploitation going on here is a bit more complicated than the norm, and nastier.  Not only is Rose used as a surrogate for the heroine of the book to be written.  Shirley and her husband also share an ulterior motive of destabilising the Nemsers’ marriage, and Stanley means to ensure that Fred doesn’t get tenure.  At the end of Shirley, the Nemsers are vanquished, their hosts victorious.  Shirley has completed her manuscript.  Stanley declares it a masterpiece.  He and his wife dance together – a reminder of the one they’ve led their hapless guests throughout.

    Shirley first screened at Sundance this year and was released on demand in America in June.  It’s due to open in UK cinemas at the end of this month and has been available to watch online as part of the London Film Festival programme.  According to quotes in a Guardian review, Josephine Decker was primarily concerned, in making the film, with the ethics of the ‘artistic process’ but she has perpetrated another kind of creative abuse – the travesty of a dead artist.  This may reflect the source of Sarah Gubbins’s screenplay, a 2014 book called Shirley: A Novel by Susan Scarf Merrell (which I’ve not read), but not necessarily so.  There’s a difference between manipulation or invention of facts and misrepresentation of character.

    Although Merrell’s story is set in 1964, two years after the publication of Jackson’s sixth and last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, it imagines the creation of her second novel, Hangsaman, published in 1951.  On the train journey to the Hymans’, Rose is reading Jackson’s notorious short story The Lottery in the New Yorker, where it appeared in 1948.  Whereas Jackson was thirty-two then, Elisabeth Moss is made up to look older than her actual age of thirty-eight.  Stanley Hyman was three years younger than his first wife but Michael Stuhlbarg is fifty-two.  Jackson’s alleged inspiration for Hangsaman was the actual disappearance-without-trace of a Bennington sophomore called Paula Jean Welden, in 1946.  The implication of Decker’s film is that Welden has disappeared quite recently.

    Playing fast and loose with the actual chronology needn’t be a problem though it is easier to accept if you use a title – as Merrell does but Decker doesn’t – that virtually admits fictionalisation.  Other adjustments made by Decker are more objectionable.  You’d never guess from her sinister, self-absorbed partnership with Stanley and seeming disdain for Rose’s pregnancy that the real Shirley and her husband had four children of their own.  Jackson suffered various physical and mental health problems in later life, largely caused by heavy drinking, smoking and reliance on prescription drugs, and died of heart disease in 1965.  Decker gives her, for good measure, a humour bypass – except, that is, for Shirley’s occasional knowing smirks and dirty cackles.  It’s unsurprising that this combination of childlessness and humourlessness has been criticised by Jackson’s son, Laurence Jackson Hyman (as quoted in a recent New Yorker piece by Michael Schulman).

    Since I don’t know Shirley Jackson’s work I can’t be sure but Josephine Decker may also have misrepresented her gifts as a writer.  The film follows Shirley: A Novel by supposedly adopting the style of one of Jackson’s ‘Gothic’ narratives – often described as hypnotic, subversive, and so on.  To do this, Decker principally deploys the tropes of horror-thriller films.  Tamar-kali’s score features discordant strings and eerie choirs.  There’s a black cat, a Tarot reading and the consumption of death cap mushrooms (or, at least, Shirley fools Rose into thinking that’s what they are).  From the outside, the Hymans’ ivy-clad house is benignly academic.  Inside, it’s crepuscular and claustrophobic, and the jittery camera movements increase a sense of disorientation.  (The cinematographer is Sturla Brandth Grøvlen.)  This is all just what you expect from the genre territory.  Shirley Jackson’s alleged originality gets lost in it.

    In the opening sequence on the train, Rose, on finishing The Lottery, is shocked but enthralled – a predictive summary of her exposure to Shirley in what follows.  Odessa Young overacts these feelings, and this, too, is a taste of things to come.  Young is clearly a skilled actor (she was the title character in The Daughter); so, to put it mildly, are Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg.  But Decker’s camera, on the occasions it calms down, scrutinises the actors at close quarters:  like the audience at the very front of a theatre, we can see them preparing their facial expressions and movement.

    Elisabeth Moss is well cast as (Decker’s conception of) Shirley Jackson but that’s not exactly a compliment.  Moss has become an expert in presenting characters who are emotionally in extremis – she does so deliberately, strikingly and wearisomely.  Michael Stuhlbarg (as he showed in Call Me by Your Name) makes a plausible don but Stanley Hyman’s menacing bonhomie is overdone.  When one of their party guests labels a piece of Shirley’s writing anti-Semitic, Stanley jokes that his wife ‘was never an anti-Semite until she married me’.  Decker keeps shooting dark-bearded Stuhlbarg in profile to stress Stanley’s malignity.  In doing so, she also emphasises his Jewishness.  This makes for a deeply uncomfortable pairing of qualities.

    Stanley is satanic and satyric.  He leches around Rose.  His dance with younger women at a faculty party – although somewhat upstaged by Shirley’s intentionally drenching a sumptuously upholstered sofa in red wine, to the horror of the Dean’s wife (Orlagh Cassidy) – suggests the prelude to a bacchanal.   It also points to what Shirley knows to be her husband’s philandering with female colleagues and students, a faculty convention into which old-hand Stanley inducts straight-arrow Fred.  Even though it’s standard practice on campus, this seems to be the kiss of death on Fred’s career prospects, as well as on his short-lived marriage.  Rose is appalled by her husband’s infidelity, despite the fact that, by this stage, she’s indulged in some kissing and dinner-table footsie with Shirley.

    The latter’s attempted seduction appears to be motivated less by sexual desire for Rose than by a determination to release her from the subservient role to which she’ll be condemned as Fred’s wife.  Shirley perceives a kinship between Rose and Paula Jean Welden.  Odessa Young occasionally appears as Paula, in scenes from the novel developing inside Shirley’s head.  Paula disappeared on a walk on Vermont’s Long Trail and these imagined scenes are set in wilderness: it’s as if Shirley sees the two young women as both  lost and trapped.  When Stanley, in one of his critical outbursts against what she’s writing, declares that Shirley knows nothing about her subject, she angrily insists that there are many American girls like Paula and she knows them well.  There’s a vague kinship between Rose and Shirley, too.  At one point near the end of the film, Rose, her hair grown wilder and her appearance more careless than before, looks to be turning into the woman who has dazzled and exploited her.  ‘Let’s pray for a boy,’ Shirley tells Rose before her baby is born, ‘the world is too cruel to girls’.  (The baby’s a girl, of course.)  This feminist strand of the material is hard to ignore but it feels half-hearted beside the overworked atmospherics and the slow-motion grip of Elisabeth Moss’s acting.  Whatever Josephine Decker may have intended with Shirley, the result is like a queasy spoof of an arty psychological horror movie.

    10 October 2020

  • On the Rocks

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sofia Coppola (2020)

    Accepting her Oscar for the screenplay of Lost in Translation (2003), Sofia Coppola acknowledged Bill Murray as her ‘muse’.  They’d  not worked together since and Coppola must have been keen to give Murray another star turn.  The role she’s written for him in the comedy-drama On the Rocks is certainly that but it comes at a cost to the film as a whole.

    This time, unlike in Lost in Translation, Murray doesn’t have the main part – at least in the sense that Rashida Jones has much more screen time.  She plays fortyish Laura, who lives with her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) and their two young daughters in a handsome New York City apartment.  Laura is a published writer, though struggling to get going on her latest project.  Dean, an ambitious businessman, is spending more and more hours at work – including wining and dining potential clients, and time away from New York.  When Laura finds a woman’s toilet bag in his luggage and asks about it, he’s unfazed:  he says it belongs to his colleague Fiona (Jessica Henwick), who hadn’t room for the bag in her own case when they returned from a business trip together and must have forgotten to ask for it back.  The discovery nevertheless crystallises suspicions in Laura’s mind that Dean and Fiona are having an affair.  She contacts her father, Felix (Murray), for advice.

    That, on the face of it, is a surprising move.  Felix, a rich art dealer, is an incorrigible playboy, whose unfaithfulness ended his marriage to Laura’s mother years ago.  Does his daughter approach him because he’s a serial womaniser – in a spirit of it-takes-one-to-know-one?  Or perhaps he’s the only person she can turn to.  We see her on a brief visit to the distaff side of the family, headed by her aged grandmother (Barbara Bain), but Laura isn’t close to these relatives and seems to have no friends in whom she can confide.  Her only regular social contact is with Vanessa (Jenny Slate), a self-obsessed, jabbering mother she has to listen to as they wait to pick up their children from school.  However, the main reason Felix must be his daughter’s confidant is that it brings Bill Murray into the picture and keeps him at its centre.

    Laura’s father is more than ready to accept her suspicions as well founded:  he knows – from the human evolution explanations that he spouts, as well as from personal experience – that all men are the same when it comes to women.  (He means all heterosexual men, though doesn’t say so.)  Felix can’t wait to prove that her husband is doing Laura wrong.  Without consulting her, he hires someone to follow and photograph Dean.  Felix then proposes that he and Laura themselves start tailing him.  In the meantime, Dean is doing his bit to increase Laura’s suspicions.  On her birthday he’s away on business with Fifi (as he’s started calling Fiona).  His unromantic present to his wife is a super-sophisticated household gadget but Felix’s spy has seen Dean shopping at Cartier.  Felix urges Laura to check Dean’s phone texts.  When she reluctantly does so, the absence of any texts at all is fishy in itself.

    Sofia Coppola’s previous films, as a body of work, are hard to define summarily but she brought a strong personal style to each one.  That’s missing from On the Rocks, which is reminiscent of Woody Allen through more than the New York setting.  The set-up and the principals’ amateurish sleuthing bring to mind Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993).  The soundtrack includes a couple of standards that lend a mellow, nostalgic flavour to proceedings, harder to understand here than it is in Allen’s work.  Vanessa, with her school-gate monologues, is the kind of facile comic makeweight to which he’ll sometimes resort.  Coppola’s script is conspicuously unlike Allen, though, in virtually ignoring the Freudian implications of Laura and Felix’s relationship, and the latter’s attitude towards his son-in-law.  ‘Is there any woman you won’t hit on?’ Laura asks Felix when he flirts with a waitress in the restaurant where they’re lunching.  Although he doesn’t reply, the answer seems to be yes, but only you (and presumably Laura’s younger sisters).  While candid about his own philandering, Felix behaves as if compelled to rescue his daughter from the treacherous man who took her from her father.  Of course Coppola doesn’t have to psychoanalyse Felix or Laura but she does need to suggest why this bright, professionally successful woman complies feebly and repeatedly with her father’s increasingly outrageous instructions – and Coppola ignores this, too.

    There are bits of enjoyably broad comedy in On the Rocks, as when Felix is stopped by a police patrol as his car careers through New York in pursuit of the cab containing Dean and Fiona.  The exceedingly well-connected Felix gets out of this tight spot when it emerges he knows the father of the cop (Mike Keller) questioning him.  When her father eventually drags Laura along to the Mexican coastal resort that’s the site of Dean’s latest business trip, it’s hard not to smile at Murray’s rendition of ‘Mexicali Rose’ on the beach there (though I tried not to:  Felix’s behaviour was getting on my nerves by now).  In films of recent years like St Vincent (2014) and The Dead Don’t Die (2019), Murray has seemed to be coasting.  There’s real pleasure in watching him re-energised by Sofia Coppola’s writing.  The role fits him like a glove but Murray’s line readings are still sharp and inventive.  There are nice details, too, in the exchanges between him and Rashida Jones, like the refresher course in whistling that Felix gives Laura.  But the basic premise doesn’t convince.  When the cop stops Felix’s car, Laura is in the passenger seat – that’s her position throughout and what’s wrong with the story.  Because Rashida Jones gives it a semblance of truth – she’s emotionally deft, often funny and her playing is highly naturalistic – you’re all the more aware of the unconvincing basis of the plot.  Spotlighting the father puts his daughter in the shadows and makes On the Rocks frustrating – though it does also have the effect of increasing curiosity about the true state of Laura’s marriage.

    It’s obvious how things will turn out.  Laura is distracted at the end of Dean’s Skype call on her birthday; she misses that he says the remaining part of her gift is to follow.  A reasonably attentive viewer won’t miss this, though; it’s no surprise, once Felix’s investigation has collapsed, when Dean takes Laura out to dinner and presents her with a Cartier box containing a watch (a meaningful choice:  Felix had just given his daughter his own posh watch, which she’s loved since her childhood).  Dean apologises for the delay – he didn’t realise engraving took so long.  The film ends with him and Laura smiling at each other but Marlon Wayans’s playing is nicely ambiguous to the last.  Except when Laura owns up to doubting him and he’s rather pompously outraged, Dean is unfailingly genial to all concerned.  He’s an adoring father but, despite his smiles and cuddles, a mechanical husband and lover.  There never is an explanation of why a go-getting entrepreneur hasn’t a single text on his phone.  Perhaps Laura’s limited resistance to her father’s crazy schemes signifies that she knows her marriage is on the rocks.  More probably, however, Sofia Coppola keeps her heroine quiet so that her muse stays in charge of the conversation.

    8 October 2020

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