Miss Jackson: SHIRLEY

With Shirley, director Josephine Decker makes the rare good movie about a real writer because she pushes down on a psychologically stormy speculative script with a heavy thumbprint on the scales of style. No dull recitation of biographical incident or overly prescribed reading of biographical detail as direct literary inspiration, she instead takes one sliver of a moment in author Shirley Jackson’s life — the creation of her 1951 novel Hangsaman — and expands and contorts it until it is a quivery, moody, push-and-pull of fraught relationships and fevered inspiration, falsehoods capturing a Jacksonian mood. The camera subtly drifts, flits, or shakes, the light contours with stormy grain or searing spots, and the jittery performances roil with turbulent interiority. Like Decker’s last film — 2018’s Madeline’s Madeline — it’s a movie about creativity and the act of creation. There the camera danced around an experimental theater group with the spirit of communal tensions. Here the camera, always close to the performers, or drifting between reality and the imagination, digs into the process of Jackson’s writing, putting her live-wire center-stage behavior — gruff and mercurial, mentally troubled and passionately literate — in an ensemble cast, but in a role that nonetheless dominates the film. It matches the ice-pick precision of her frightening writing — typified by her most famous work, the perennially anthologized short story “The Lottery” — in the way it lets unusual detail accumulate and dark impressions accrue. The world of a Jackson story is sinister and unsettled, a cruel logic gripping an illogical world, a disturbed discomfort, a madness bubbling out of desires’ inability to contain life’s mysteries. The movie crackles with the hunger of these unknowable compulsions. It’s a film that makes this writer’s literary imagination so powerful, it bends the experience of others towards hers, and blurs the boundaries between her fiction and her failings.

We enter her anxious world through the eyes of a pair of graduate students (Odessa Young and Logan Lerman) who arrive to join Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) and her professor husband (Michael Stuhlbarg) in their respective works. The novel-in-progress, a work of gothic fiction about a college girl, dovetails with themes and patterns as the older couple alternately attracts and repulses the younger one, together in conjoined downward spirals of despair and description, creation and envy. The gregarious older man brings in the younger as an assistant, and pushes him away as it looks as if he might be able to join the department, even as he draws him into his bad habits. The troubled older woman — Moss a fearsome force, bending whole scenes to her glowering unease or prickly poise, a storm of desires and disorders lending an unpredictable air to her every scene — hammers away at her manuscript, when she can manage it. Otherwise she marinates in her anxieties provoked by what she views as betrayals of her body, her agoraphobia, her visions of blood and sex.

The movie never exactly says Jackson’s dark stories were only possible because of her mind’s dark tracks, but merely that her fearfulness of her own mind was the same jolt of paranoia that threads through her prose, and that her writing is so controlled because she struggles to control herself. It avoids confining her, or the film’s startling, swooning, sumptuously sensual creepiness, to limiting biographical criticism. It’s far too artful, and tantalizingly interpretive, for that. As the film portrays her, Jackson knows too well how one’s mind could betray oneself, how one’s deep cruelty can project outwards and inwards in uneven proportion. As she pulls her new young assistant into her world, she places the seeds of their falling out. And so the movie is about the intensity of four character’s connections, a quadrangle of jealousies in cutthroat gamesmanship of tenure and manuscripts, appetites and apprehension, in a dance of disordered personalities. The quicksilver screenplay by Sarah Gubbins from a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell is one of intense feeling and sharp dialogue — consumed with simmering fears and bursts of manic work, of fleshly failings and intellectual aims brought to vivid life by Decker's filmmaking.

Gaslighter: THE INVISIBLE MAN

Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man knows a monster movie is only as good as its metaphor. Thus it spins a gripping, upsetting, and satisfying chiller out of a great one. It starts with a woman (Elisabeth Moss) escaping an abusive relationship, her controlling boyfriend (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) so outraged at that prospect that, when he awakes to find her sneaking away in the middle of the night, he runs at the car and punches its window out. She just barely flees, and as she tries to recover a life for herself with the help of her sister (Harriet Dyer) and a friend (Aldis Hodge), she feels haunted by her poisonous relationship. The key to the film’s working so well is its grounding the psychology of these opening scenes. Selling the realism of the moment is a raw and open performance from Moss (drawing on her Mad Men poise and Handmaid's Tale despair) and tenterhooks prickling filmmaking from Whannell (veteran genre craftsman most recently of the gory good sci-fi actioner Upgrade). There's a deliberate pace, ice-cold cinematography often isolating her in the frame, amped-up sound design making every sudden noise a potential threat. It puts the audience in her headspace. This isn’t merely a pulp start; an entirely convincing realistic drama might be spun from these truthful, observant scenes of a woman readjusting after living under the thumb of a cruel, manipulative partner. The acting is rooted in precisely calibrated real-world horror. Her partner was already a monster before he’s even more of a monster. 

That the movie uses this sturdy, steady foundation for its central metaphor makes everything that follows all the more effective and suspenseful. A couple weeks after her escape, she hears that he’s killed himself. This should make her feel safer. At least, that’s what her support system tries to tell her. But she can’t shake the feeling that her abuser is around — a hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck sense that someone is watching. When it escalates to objects in the background suddenly moving — a gleaming knife slipping off that counter; a disembodied puff of breath on a cold porch — and then props in the foreground behaving strangely — an open door, a yanked sheet — it’s clear there’s something going on. And it’s even clearer that every little ghost-story style poltergeist activity is calibrated to make her appear crazy, to sow doubt in her support system, to isolate her and maintain her invisible abuser’s manipulative control over her life. It’s a haunting metaphor, and the undetectable, unpredictable effects of its monster’s actions make for truly unsettling negative space, and the most jolting of jump scares. As the movie springs its surprises, explaining its conceit, revealing new layers of horror, and paying off elements you won’t even realize were setups in the first place, Whannell takes great pleasure in playing the audience, twisting the knife with sudden shocks while dangling the possibility for catharsis. It’s an exceptionally well-crafted feat of genre fare, brilliantly reconfiguring H.G. Wells’ original idea via the recently buzzworded classic film Gaslight into a freshly creepy bit of horror filmmaking. It’s hugely entertaining with its chilly tension impressively sustained, while at its center is the painful story of a woman whose inside-out understanding of her ex’s evil is dangerously disbelieved.

Art Attack: THE SQUARE

Ruben Östlund makes thesis movies, films laying out clinical observations about human interactions and then slowly working out a variety of scenarios in response that serve to bolster the central argument. It worked so well in his prickly, icily perceptive Force Majeure – a mercilessly contained film about a ski trip that turns sour when the dopey dad flees an avalanche and leaves his wife and kids to fend for themselves, an act of cowardice that’s even more pathetic when the disaster doesn’t strike – that there’s little wonder The Square can’t compete in focused anxiety. It drifts and wanders where the earlier film bored down with unflinching examination. But Östlund remains an expert dramatist of exceptional awkward encounters, scenes squirming with discomfort. It makes for a compelling watch. Here the plot precariously teeters (wobbling on the line between too-obvious and too-obtuse) on a Stockholm museum of contemporary art where good progressive values and high-minded boundary pushing are all well and good until they’re put to the test in the lives of the curator (Claes Bang) and his staff. This is heightened by Östlund’s stubborn camera, locked down in such a way that often leaves a confrontation bifurcated, half playing out off screen. It’s about reactions, about the complications stirring up distress despite and because of our inability to completely understand what’s going on.

Contained in a gallery – piles of ashen gravel; a wall-sized video portrait of a growling man; a pile of chairs with a scraping soundtrack – it’s fine, even noble, to see provocations. But then a pickpocket’s convoluted scheme interrupts a morning commute, a patron with Tourette’s constantly and profanely interrupts an artist (Dominic West) during a serious Q&A session, a journalist (Elisabeth Moss) interrogates her one-night-stand while a docent peers around the corner to eavesdrop, callow young ad men propose a nasty viral video to promote a peaceful installation, or a performance artist (Terry Notary) monkeying around escalates anxiety in a posh fundraising dinner. Well, that’s another thing entirely. Here’s a world of big money donors and thoughtful artists while beggers sit ignored on the street outside before them. How productive is an interest in being provoked if it’s only to be easily digested and safely squared away? Early in the film, the curator explains a conundrum: will anything become art if placed in an art museum? What, then, about the opposite? Is a provocation only fruitful when safely walled-off? What is a boundary of good taste, of free speech, of proper behavior? This is a fussily meandering movie, slowly interrogating the ideas by knocking the characters out of their comfort zones and then pulling them back, leaving them frazzled. The movie slowly accrues, and ultimately peters out, but moment by fascinatingly uncomfortable moment it’s hilariously sharp. Painstakingly dissected encounters, pulled off with fine deadpan slightly-heightened realism, become, at their best, sustained tremors of pleasurable suspenseful disruption.

Interiors: QUEEN OF EARTH

If you hear there’s a new tiny character drama about a woman who, mourning the death of her father and having left her boyfriend, rents a vacation home with her best friend, you’re probably already imagining a treacly little indie going through the same quirky life-affirming motions. Luckily Queen of Earth, the movie in question, does no such thing. It imagines an entire psychological world for its characters, and commits to following their complicated emotional drivers to intense and uncompromising places. We open on Elisabeth Moss’s face, makeup streaked after what must’ve been a tremendous cry. She’s breaking up with her partner, who remains off screen as we’re pinned mere inches from her face, taking in every jagged breath and spit of anger. “Don’t look at me,” she snaps. And yet we can’t look away.

This is an Alex Ross Perry movie, a designation we can now, after four films, start to identify as marking a project that’ll start with recognizable territory and take us somewhere unexpected. He’s a terrific writer-director who seems to have made it his mission to take on projects which are in broad strokes overfamiliar types, and then coloring them in with a whole interesting palate all his own. His 2011 sophomore effort The Color Wheel was on the surface a brother/sister road trip movie shot through with mumblecore plotting and fumbling banter, but it was photographed in gorgeously textured black and white and built to a tremendous scene that caught its characters in close sustained crescendo of messy feelings. Then there’s his previous feature, Listen Up Philip, which was a prickly man-child relationship comedy that allowed its characters unusual room to be themselves, following various members of the ensemble down wandering paths of lovely character moments rich and tender.

What sets Perry apart is the thought and intentionality behind his creative choices. He’s not simply showing off his chops – although he is – or making movies that’ll get him studio paychecks – though he will. He’s telling cinematic stories, taking the raw material of any indie drama and making of it self-consciously literary dialogue and overwhelming visual precision. So when the opening title card of Queen of Earth stomps in with fancy red cursive popping against the stark grey sadness of the opening image, it’s clear we’re in the hands of a confident filmmaker. We follow Moss into a lake house chamber drama where her friend (Inherent Vice's Katherine Waterson) finds herself moving cautiously, walking on eggshells, as her friend grieves over her intersectional heartbreaks. Perry uses slow dissolves, sharp cuts, and icy silences to simmer with suspense. With glacial horror pacing and a needling thriller score, it’s less Your Sister’s Sister, more an American Persona done up with hints of Repulsion.

With editor Robert Greene’s methodically precise cutting, the mood of the film is intoxicatingly deliberate and unblinkingly disorienting. It will cut back to the previous year, where we see a much happier Moss in the same rental house. Watterson is there as well, a little grumpy because her friend’s boyfriend (Kentucky Audley) is along for the vacation. Serving as an ironic counterpoint to the sad present, where the presence of what Moss perceives as an interloping neighbor (Patrick Fugit) seemingly reminds her of what she’s lost, these glimpses of happier times cut into long pushes in on intense emoting. It is uncut psychological pain artfully rendered, where even good memories are jabs in the side. Social interactions become a nightmare, others looming over. Precise blocking, smooth surfaces, and dramatic lighting highlight the air of tension even in mundane moments. Acutely misophonic sound design heightens chewing, swallowing, choking.

A tricky two-hander, the film captures the stultifying balancing act of trying to support someone in their time of emotional distress, a period of psychic suffering that’s difficult to be around, and yet hard to avoid for those who care about their loved one. As a portrait of depression, it’s the most soul-draining, nerve-jangling one since Von Trier’s Melancholia. But unlike that film, which was so drunk on melancholy it left me sick to my stomach – a compliment, by the way – Queen of Earth maintains an icier tone, a clinically sympathetic eye on Moss’s elusive, slippery performance. She’s called upon to play a double-edged emotional high-wire act. In flashbacks, she’s sunny. In the present, she’s on the bleeding edge of stability. Waterson, meanwhile, has an even slipperier role, filtering layers of grumpiness and wariness through an exterior that’s trying not to compound her friend’s problems. It’s rare to find a film so concerned with and attuned to friends’ interdependent emotional support systems. In doing so, there's warmth, even some laughs, underneath fraught feelings.

Shot on film by cinematographer Sean Price Williams, the film’s cold touch and sharp blocking keep the characters pinned in together, caught in adjacent headspace even when not physically together. They can hear muffled sounds through walls. They can take phone calls in the yard, leaking one-sided conversations into the house, though they can maintain mystery with a brisk “Don’t ask.” One striking shot captures both floors of the house in the same frame, perched on the stairs in such a way that we can really feel the disjunction between the figure leaning against a kitchen counter downstairs and the one upstairs slowly dragging herself out of bed. Perry shows equal interest in the character’s mental states as he does the filmmaking techniques he so adeptly manipulates. This is a difficult and finely sustained work of psychological observation, diving into miserable depths of pity, ego, and insecurity with a shifty but unblinking thriller’s eye for dread.

Go West, Young Writer: ON THE ROAD

I, like many bookish English major types I suppose, have some lingering Beat desires to road trip across America and see what inspiration and experience I can stumble upon. To drive across the vast expanse of roadways crisscrossing the United States, open to possibility, ready to gather raw material for projects made up of the written word, has a powerful romantic pull. For me, this doesn’t even have anything to do with Jack Kerouac or his novel On the Road, which has its minor pleasures, but is no sacred text to me. No, this desire within me is inherited from nothing more than the reverberations of the Beat generation’s go-west-young-writer influence, a sense of literary manifest destiny and direction.

So I have both a rooting interest and a disinterest in the film adaptation of On the Road. I’m sympathetic to the impulse behind the plot, while conflicted over the source material’s place in the literary canon. Over half a century after the novel’s release, it is director Walter Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera who have brought the book to the screen, finding some compelling episodic energy here and there in this period piece as young writer Sal (Sam Riley) makes his way through American landscapes. The majority of this particular picture, however, is a slog of a road trip. This is a drudgery in which the sights out the windows and the character actors at each stop are meant to carry the day. This is an adaptation that misses the point. For me, what pleasures that can be found in Kerouac’s novel are all in the prose. It’s not what happens, but how it’s recounted through the flavor and cadence of the writing. Of course that’s tricky to capture cinematically, but once removed, all that’s left of On the Road is an opportunity to really highlight how empty a narrative it is.

How strange, then, or perhaps how lucky, to find nice performances scattered throughout the morass of it all. They are occasional crackles of charm in an otherwise overwhelmingly bland trudge. The road takes Sal to Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams, Kirsten Dunst, Elisabeth Moss and Steve Buscemi, among others doing fine work in underserved roles. Sal is sometimes joined by Dean (Garrett Hedlund) and Marylou (Kristen Stewart). Those two actors in particular are delivering something approaching career highlight work in a movie that plays as if destined to be largely forgotten. Hedlund and Stewart are two performers who, when thrust into big budget material (like Tron and Twilight, respectively) are consistently (unfairly, I would say) derided as one note, stiff and unconvincing. Here, they’re loose – naked and emotional, open and vulnerable, confident and hesitant – in ways that prove their detractors wrong. They’re actors and good ones at that, able to convincingly play blank blockbuster types just as thoroughly as more nuanced character work. They’re rather enjoyable at times, just as the rest of the exceedingly talented cast is putting in agreeable hard work.

But this shouldn’t feel like work. Salles’s picture is trying so hard for freewheeling filmmaking that it’s a strain. The stream-of-obviousness plot stumbles when it should glide, muddles when it should clarify. It wears out its welcome then drifts, feeling repetitive and tiresome until it finally ends. Worst of all, there are dumbly obvious scenes of Sal bent over a typewriter, hammering away at the prose some of us will recognize from the novel. It’s a typically movie portrayal of a writer, scrunched and self-important, as if our Kerouac proxy already knows that he’s writing a book of some historical note. He types as if he’s placing himself on syllabi before our very eyes. But here is a film that is so relaxed and aimless that it fails to work up the energy to make an argument for its own existence, let alone its source materials. It’s just too low-key to do itself justice.