SHIRLEY - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Day 3

SHIRLEY is the most remarkable film I have seen all year - as stylish, slippery and dangerous as the writer whose fictionalised inner life it portrays.  It's filled with riotous rebellious performances and deep empathy for smart women who just won't lie down. 

The centre of the film is a phenomenal performance from Elisabeth Moss (THE HANDMAID'S TALE) as the notorious, brilliant author Shirley Jackson (The Lottery, The Haunting At Hill House).  When we meet her, Shirley is already an infamous author of dangerously dark works, earning far more than her husband, Professor Stanley Hyman. But she's also undone by depression and writer's block - visibly dishevelled, scabrous and scared to leave the house.  Meanwhile her husband (Michael Stuhlbarg) is one of those aggressively extrovert characters who might seem charming at first, but is both supportive of his wife's brilliance but also capable of nasty jealousy-inflected put-downs. He also consciously uses his buffoonish behaviour to get way too close and handsy with other women. But the brilliance of this film is to show how the couple really does love each other and respect each other.  Shirley knows Stanley cheats, and even though she hates it, she'll protect him from others exploiting that fact. And most importantly of all for a couple who live by their words, it is HIS opinion of her writing that she respects most of all.  To that end, the relationship reminded me of Leonard and Virginia Woolf as much as of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

The fatal mistake of young Rose Nemser (Odessa Young) is to think that Shirley really does hate her husband and that she can drive a wedge between them. Poor Rose doesn't realise that while Shirley might be fascinated by her youth, and courage in sticking around despite the barbs, at some point she will force "the children" out because she has what she needs for her book. But then again, Rose also gets something out of the relationship.  When we meet her, she is a beautifully put together young wife of a young assistant professor (Logan Lerman) moving in temporarily with Jackson and Hyman while they find a place to stay.  Hyman begs them to stay longer rent-free and help look after his sick wife. Rose is pregnant and has dropped out of university and Shirley mocks her for it.  But as Rose wins Shirley's trust and they both start investigating the disappearance of a young college girl called Paula, we see the three ladies merge into one.  Shirley starts to become more put together - her hair less wild - and she starts to write again. She also imagines Rose as the disappeared Paula. And Rose becomes ragged, weighed down by pregnancy, heat, her husband's indifference and then infidelity. But she also knows more about herself and her husband and has found an inner strength and her own barbed tongue!  More profoundly, we realise that all three women are in the same position. All three have expectations of what they will be, how they will look, what barriers society will place on where and how they can be smart.  They are asked to live circumscribed lives, and is it surprising that this drives them mad?

The central performances are all stunning here, not least from Odessa Young as Rose who holds her own against Moss and Stuhlbarg.  But let's spend some time on how phenomenal Josephine Decker's direction is.  It's slippery and ambitious and deeply empathetic.  The camera is kinetic and intimate and seems to get under the skin of the characters.  For a film that's basically about four people taking around a dinner table in a single house, it never felt claustrophobic or static, unless it very deliberately wanted to be.  And kudos to the production designer too, for making a house that heaves and pens in and can feel sinister and prison-like. I loved everything about how imaginative this film was, and how the real and imagined were allowed to intertwine.  Finally, kudos to the costume designer Amela Baksic who so brilliantly uses dress and hairstyle to convey the expectations society had of women at this time, and to visually delineate each woman's state of mind as it evolves through the film.

SHIRLEY is rated R and has a running time of 107 minutes. It played Sundance, Berlin and London 2020.  It opened in the US this summer, and will open in the UK on October 30th.

UNCLE KENT - Mumblecore, softcore, borecore

While kicking up a riot at Scoundrels Chicago, I managed to break out and detox for a little over an hour in the mecca for all film reviewers - The Gene Siskel Film Center. I wandered in to the first film showing - which happened to be Joe Swanberg's mumblecore flick, UNCLE KENT. Just as its genre conventions require, UNCLE KENT is a low-budget lo-fi drama basically consisting of a bunch of financially comfortable but emotionally illiterate twenty and thirty somethings whining about their personal problems and jacking off. That might sound dismissive and I think the genre does have a tendency toward self-indulgence and baggy-narratives. However, when in the right hands it has managed to throw up movies of real warmth, depth and honesty. Think Alex Holdridge's IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS and the Duplass brothers' CYRUS - both of which made it to my Best Of lists.

Unfortunately, UNCLE KENT is no CYRUS. In fact, at a 72 minute run time including credits, it's barely a feature length film. It stars Kent Osborne (real-life animator on Spongebob Squarepants as "Kent" - a commitment-phobe jack-ass in the body of a forty-year old who dresses ten years too young. As with most mumblecore flicks, Kent espouses a kind of slacker freedom and mediates all his personal relationships through the internet. As the film opens, Kent picks up a girl called Kate (Jennifer Prediger) on Chatroulette - a website usually known for men jacking off on webcam - a point later demonstrated in the film. Still from such unpromising beginnings, the pair to seem to have a genuine connection. The tragedy is that they can only express it by having a threesome with a girl they meet on Craigslist. And as the weekend winds up, the downside of "slacker freedom" is painfully obvious to us and to Kent - not knowing where you stand - not being able to speak honestly about feelings, but constantly speaking openly about sex.

The movie looks better - more tripod shots - than in Swanberg's previous work, although he still uses POV shots and handheld cameras to annoyingly trite effect. The narrative is baggy and meandering and bores, even though the run-time is short. Most of all, while the movie did contain flashes of honesty about how my generation dates via the the web, it didn't really get under the skin of their emotional lives. One day, Swanberg is going to have to sit down and write a proper script and move beyond superficial "wisdom" about the distancing effect of the internet.

UNCLE KENT played Sundance 2011 and was released on a variety of media in the US earlier this year. It is currently playing at the Gene Siskel Center in Chicago.