BEFORE: I'm back from Massachusetts, but since I had to get up at 5:30 am to catch an Acela train back to NYC, I didn't stay up watching a movie the night before, which means that I'm playing catch-up. Really, I'm right on schedule, but since I'm no longer ahead, then I feel like I'm somehow lagging behind. Maybe I can catch up again on the upcoming holiday weekend, but I'm also interviewing for a job today, and if I get it, I could be busy on nights and weekends. I don't want to jinx it, though, so I'll say no more about it.
Odessa Young carries over from "A Million Little Pieces".
THE PLOT: A famous horror writer finds inspiration for her next book after she and her husband take in a young couple.
AFTER: I guess the pandemic's not really over until I stop noticing connections to it in every movie. "Papillon" had a character spending a lot of time in solitary confinement, and "A Million Little Pieces" had people in rehab, which is another place of confinement. Today's film depicts author Shirley Jackson as some kind of shut-in, someone who doesn't leave her bed for days at a time, and I think we've all been there over this past year, or at least we all wanted at some point to just pull the covers over our heads and stay in our safe spaces.
Maybe it's for the best that I didn't notice the Elisabeth Moss connection to two films I watched in February - there is a bunch of relationship-y issues stuff here, mostly about infidelity and betrayal and married people being terrible to each other, so that doesn't really feel like a very romantic, February sort of film. I've included films like that in my romance chain, but then they tend to stand out and feel like they maybe don't belong.
Look, I don't know what went down between Shirley (Ms. Jackson if you're nasty) and her husband, Stanley Hyman. They had four kids together, who were conveniently left out of this story because they only would have gotten in the way of the narrative. But if she was an author and he was a professor of literary criticism, that doesn't sound like a healthy pairing, wouldn't he always be critiquing her work, and how is that constructive? Maybe they were very progressive and they had some kind of open marriage (anything's OK, as long as you tell your spouse about it) but similarly, is that healthy in the long run? Like, "Honey, I had an affair, but don't take it personally..." Well, is there any other way to take it? Shirley, as depicted here, claims to be OK with it on some level, but it's quite obvious that she's NOT OK with it. So, umm, then why allow it in the first place?
Prof. Hyman seems quite adept at finding a college-age couple among his lecturing candidates, and convincing them to come live in his house, doing cooking and cleaning in exchange for free room and board. You know, just until they get settled and find a place of their own - and it seems perhaps that if that leads to something kinky, some swapping sort of deal or a potential affair for him or Shirley, well, that sort of thing was deemed very progressive in the 1950's. Hyman taught at Bennington College in Vermont, and while New England has a reputation for being conservative, it might have been very pre-hippie liberal up there around the college, it's tough to say, maybe they were getting a jump on the era of "free love".
But then there's Shirley's personality, and it seems rather grating and snarky, which seems counter to attracting young male lovers. Female ones, that's another story - Stanley notes that she's "smitten" with young Rose, and he doesn't seem all that surprised. But is this just a case of overlaying modern sensibilities about lesbian attraction over a story set in the before-times? And then there's her writing, this is set shortly after the short story "The Lottery" was published, and it basically blew people's minds to know that a woman could write something so dark. It had the kind of twist ending that probably inspired half of the episodes of "The Twilight Zone", and her book "The Haunting of Hill House" was called one of the most important horror novels of the century, according to Stephen King.
This film covers the time after "The Lottery" was published, as Shirley was working on the novel "Hangsaman", partially inspired by the disappearance of a local female college student, Paula Jean Welden. Here Shirley's young boarder, Rose, is depicted as another source of inspiration, and in a sense that fills in the gaps between the real Welden disappearance and the book Shirley Jackson wrote - but this is a clear case of reverse-engineering, making up facts to show how something could have happened, in the hopes that becomes more interesting than the real story about how it all went down. Welden disappeared in the woods, and as we saw in the movie "The Devil All the Time", hiking out in the woods alone is a very bad idea. Four other people disappeared in the same Vermont woods over a five-year period, but no serial killer was ever found in the area, and in fact Vermont had no state police at the time.
Shirley keeps having some kind of psychic visions, or imagines that she does, however her relationship with Rose Nemser and the investigation into the Welden case start to blur together, perhaps because of a physical resemblance between the two, and since Rose is pregnant, Shirley surmises that perhaps Welden was pregnant, but this is a leap in logic, and might be contrary to actual facts in the case. It's even loosely suggested here that if Shirley Jackson's husband was having affairs with students, he might even have been responsible in some way for a student's disappearance, but again, this may be based on a blurring of reality and he was probably just a cheater and not a killer. Similar to Harriet Tubman, Jackson had a medical condition that caused dizziness and fainting spells, which she may have interpreted as psychic visions, it's tough to say. She was also on various medications to treat her anxiety and agoraphobia, so she was on barbiturates to calm down and also amphetamines for weight loss (which was common at the time), but that's the cycle of uppers and downers that we now call the "Judy Garland special".
Things start to fall apart when Rose begins to suspect that her husband, Fred, is also having affairs with students. Helpful relationship tip, be wary of a husband that teaches at an all-girl's college. Yes, it was a different time than now, but men back then still should have been more aware that affairs don't occur in a vacuum, they would have consequences. But not lesbian affairs, those are different and special and don't have any consequences and therefore shouldn't be judged by the same standard. What a bunch of malarkey. Still, the movie found a way to make a lesbian attraction incredibly boring, and that's not easy to do.
Also starring Elisabeth Moss (last seen in "The Seagull"), Michael Stuhlbarg (last seen in "Call Me by Your Name"), Logan Lerman (last seen in "What Women Want"), Victoria Pedretti (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Orlagh Cassidy (last seen in "Motherhood"), Robert Wuhl (last seen in "Cobb"), Paul O'Brien, Bisserat Tseggai, Allen McCullough, Edward O'Blenis, Steve Vinovich (last seen in "The Intern").
RATING: 4 out of 10 eggs dropped on the floor (WTF?)
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