Shirley is a brilliantly performed thriller/drama about real-life horror writer Shirley Jackson (Elizabeth Moss) as she struggles to write a new novel. I can't really say more about the plot lest I spoil it and rob you of the experience of questioning your own intelligence but let's just say it's not your average biopic.
Before we started watching the film, I told Greg I could only see Moss as June from The Handmaid's Tale. He added "and Peggy" (from Mad Men). Then I added, "Oh and that character in Us." And he said, "And the cop from Top of the Lake." And we both concluded that, in fact, Moss is an incredible chameleon and indeed she transformed again for this film into a raspy-voiced, mentally unstable hermit.
The film is very moody. It's dark, with beautifully composed shots elevated by a score best described as stressful plinky-plonky music. As the tension in the film rises, each pluck of a string sounds as if it's about to snap, just like Shirley herself.
It's a difficult balance for a film to strike between how much work is reasonable to ask of the viewer and how open-ended the meaning can be before the film tips over into being baffling or - worse - irritating. Shirley walks that line pretty closely. I got it in the end -or at least Greg and I came to the same conclusion - but there are still bits that I don't have an explanation for.
It's meticulously made and repeat viewings would bear fruit I'm sure but who has the time for that when you're three baskets deep in laundry, your inbox is full of required reading and you've got two costumes to organise for tomorrow's school carnival?
HE SAW
At the end of the movie, I told Zanna I thought it was little more than a gussied-up version of early 2000s pop trash horror film The Others, in which the shock twist is that Nicole Kidman is a ghost.
"They've slapped Martin Scorsese and Elisabeth Moss on it and called it highbrow," I said. "I'm sorry, but it's the same story."
Zanna hadn't seen The Others, so couldn't refute that - but did. Her argument was that the events in Shirley, unlike the events in The Others, were not intended to be "real" but to act as metaphor. This annoyed me, because I sensed she was probably right.
Metaphor or no, it was very difficult to know at any given point what was going on and why. Zanna said: "I do think it's very much a problem of motherhood that I don't feel like I've got the time to sit here and think about what that was about."
"You've got to make the time," I said.
Yeah," she said, "But that's part of the constant busyness of motherhood: 'Okay, okay, I've got a spare moment: I need to do this. I've got a spare moment: I've got this, this, this and this to do.' And pondering what something meant, or something like that - a complex film idea - is something that I just haven't had the time to do for a number of years."
That comment gave me a flash of insight. I became excited. I said: "Here, ironically, we're at the heart of the movie. She has chosen to give birth to a book. The long painful process of that, the necessary convalescence that goes along with it, the mental pain, the anguish, the bedriddenness, are all analogous to the convalescence, the bedriddenness, the mental anguish and pain of giving birth to a child.
"Once the book is done, you're greeted with acclaim. Once the child is done, you begin the long, painful process that occludes the production of any sort of work of creativity. Your creativity is stifled by the presence of the child or children. And on an ongoing basis, there is no light at the end of that tunnel."
"Great," she said. "That's great."
I hadn't meant for it to sound that dark. Obviously family is far more important than creative work.
