Shirley – Memphis Flyer

There’s no denying that 2020 was an unprecedented year, so I’m doing something unprecedented: combining film and TV into one year-end list.

Steve Carrell sucking up oxygen in Space Force.

Worst TV: Space Force

Satirizing Donald Trump’s useless new branch of the military probably seemed like a good idea at the time. But Space Force is an aggressively unfunny boondoggle that normalizes the neo-fascism that almost swallowed America in 2020.

John David Washington (center) and Robert Pattinson (right) are impeccably dressed secret time agents in Tenet.

Worst Picture: Tenet

Christopher Nolan’s latest gizmo flick was supposed to save theaters from the pandemic. Instead, it was an incoherent, boring, self-important mess. You’d think $200 million would buy a sound mix with discernible dialogue. I get angry every time I think about this movie.

We Can’t Wait

Best Memphis Film: We Can’t Wait

Lauren Ready’s Indie Memphis winner is a fly-on-the-wall view of Tami Sawyer’s 2019 mayoral campaign. Unflinching and honest, it’s an instant Bluff City classic.

Grogu, aka The Child, aka Baby Yoda

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Grogu, The Mandalorian

In this hotly contested category, Baby Yoda barely squeaks out a win over Buck from Call of the Wild. Season 2 of the Star Wars series transforms The Child by calling his presumed innocence into question, transforming the story into a battle for his soul.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton

Most Inspiring: Hamilton

The year’s emotional turning point was the Independence Day Disney+ debut of the Broadway mega-hit. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop retelling of America’s founding drama called forth the better angels of our nature.

Film About a Father Who

Best Documentary: Film About a Father Who

More than 35 years in the making, Lynne Sachs’ portrait of her mercurial father, legendary Memphis bon vivant Ira Sachs Sr., is as raw and confessional as its subject is inscrutable. Rarely has a filmmaker opened such a deep vein and let the truth bleed out.

Cristin Milioti in Palm Springs

Best Comedy: Palm Springs

Andy Samberg is stuck in a time loop he doesn’t want to break until he accidentally pulls Cristin Milioti in with him. It’s the best twist yet on the classic Groundhog Day formula, in no small part because of Milioti’s breakthrough performance. It perfectly captured the languid sameness of the COVID summer.

Soul

Best Animation: Soul

Pixar’s Pete Docter, co-directing with One Night in Miami writer Kemp Powers, creates another little slice of perfection. Shot through with a love of jazz, this lusciously animated take on A Matter of Life and Death stars Jamie Foxx as a middle school music teacher who gets his long-awaited big break, only to die on his way to the gig. Tina Fey is the disembodied soul who helps him appreciate that no life devoted to art is wasted.

Jessie Buckley

Best Performance: Jessie Buckley, I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Buckley is the acting discovery of the year. She’s perfect in Fargo as Nurse Mayflower, who hides her homicidal mania under a layer of Midwestern nice. But her performance in Charlie Kaufman’s mind-bending psychological horror is a next-level achievement. She conveys Lucy’s (or maybe it’s Louisa, or possibly Lucia) fluid identity with subtle changes of postures and flashes of her crooked smile.

Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis, Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, and Jonathan Majors in Da 5 Bloods.

MVP: Spike Lee

Lee dropped not one but two masterpieces this year. Treasure of the Sierra Madre in the jungle, the kaleidoscopic Vietnam War drama Da 5 Bloods reckons with the legacy of American imperialism with an all-time great performance by Delroy Lindo as a Black veteran undone by trauma, greed, and envy. American Utopia is the polar opposite; a joyful concert film made in collaboration with David Byrne that rocks the body while pointing the way to a better future. In 2020, Lee made a convincing case that he is the greatest living American filmmaker.

Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk in Better Call Saul

Best TV: Better Call Saul

How could Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s prequel to the epochal Breaking Bad keep getting better in its fifth season? The writing is as sharp as ever, and Bob Odenkirk’s descent from the goofy screwup Jimmy McGill to amoral drug cartel lawyer Saul Goodman is every bit the equal of Bryan Cranston’s transformation from Walter White to Heisenberg. This was the season that Rhea Seehorn came into her own as Kim Wexler. Saul’s superlawyer wife revealed herself as his equal in cunning. If she can figure out what she wants in life, she will be the most dangerous character in a story filled with drug lords, assassins, and predatory bankers.

Michael Stuhlbarg and Elisabeth Moss in Shirley.

Best Picture: Shirley

Elisabeth Moss is brilliant as writer Shirley Jackson in Josephine Decker’s experimental biographical drama. Michael Stuhlbarg co-stars as her lit professor husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, who is at once her biggest fan and bitterest enemy. Into this toxic stew of a relationship is dropped Rose (Odessa Young), the pregnant young wife of Hyman’s colleague Fred (Logan Lerman), who becomes Shirley’s muse/punching bag. If Soul is about art’s life-giving power, Shirley is about art’s destructive dark side. Shirley is too flinty and idiosyncratic to get mainstream recognition, but it’s a stunning, unique vision straight from the American underground.

Shirley begins with Rose Nemser (Odessa Young) discovering Shirley Jackson the same way most people do, by reading “The Lottery.” Part dystopia, part folk horror, and part social commentary, “The Lottery” is about an idyllic small town that chooses a citizen at random to stone to death every year. The story’s stark warning about the dangers of blindly following tradition have reverberated since it was first published in 1948, and it is now taught in high school literature classes. But it wasn’t always revered. Many found it baffling and nauseating. Later in the film, Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) describes it as “the most hated story in the history of The New Yorker.”

The love/hate dynamic is the core of Josephine Decker’s loose biopic of Shirley Jackson. Based on a book by Susan Scarf Merrell, the story focuses on a time in the early 1950s when the writer was creating her second novel, Hangsaman. She is living with her husband, literary professor Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), at Bennington College. Shirley is desperately depressed as she tries to crack the character of Paula Jean Welden, a Bennington student who mysteriously disappeared in the Vermont woods, for her novel.

Michael Stuhlbarg (left) and Elisabeth Moss shine as Stanley Hyman and haunted horror author Shirley Jackson in director Josephine Decker’s new biopic about Jackson’s life.

If Shirley doesn’t serve any other function in your life, I hope it makes you feel better about your relationship — or lack of one. Shirley and Stanley are the Magic Johnson and Larry Bird of psychological abuse. Stanley is a popular professor and notorious philanderer who openly flouts his co-ed conquests. Shirley is an acute observer of humanity who does not hesitate to use her powers to drop the most hurtful comment at the moment of maximum psychological damage. And yet, they’re perfect for each other. Maybe it’s because they’re the only ones who can keep each other in check. Without Shirley, Stanley would be just another predatory monster. Without Stanley urging her to keep writing, Shirley would have wandered into traffic long ago.

Into this unholy mix comes Rose and her husband Fred (Logan Lerman). Fred is a young adjunct professor assigned to Stanley’s department. He and Rose move in with the battling Hyman-Jacksons at the beginning of the semester. It’s only supposed to be for a little while, just until they can find their own place in town. In exchange for room and board, Rose helps out around the house. Shirley at first eyes her with suspicion, and lashes her with an acid tongue. But when Rose proves she can take the abuse, Shirley enlists her for a little larcenous book research. Rose becomes unexpectedly pregnant and slowly falls into a psychosexual codependence with Shirley.

Director Josephine Decker got her start as an actress in the mumblecore movement of the early Obama years in Joe Swanberg’s Uncle Kent. The primary imprint those zero-budget digital flicks have had on film and television has been the naturalistic acting style of people like Lena Dunham and Greta Gerwig. Like her contemporary Gerwig, Decker flourished when she moved into the big chair. Shirley carries the imprint of an earlier, much more experimental strain of American DIY filmmaking, exemplified by Memphis director Morgan Jon Fox. Decker and cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen make balletic use of handheld cameras, always finding fresh, perfect angles. The lighting is low, and the colors frequently luminous. They have a particular love for playing shadows off Odessa Young’s gothic cheekbones.

The real fireworks happen when the camera is pointed at Elisabeth Moss. She goes full Bette Davis as she portrays Shirley’s bursting portfolio of mental illnesses. I feel like I’ve typed these words before, as Moss just keeps topping herself, but this may be her best role yet. Shirley is a snarling, feral intellect, at once cunningly manipulative and completely unguarded against the microaggressions of daily life.

After a recent panel at the Oxford Virtual Film Festival, I came to realize that what defines experimental film is the filmmaker’s devotion to finding new and unusual processes to create their art. Decker’s former work such as Thou Wast Mild and Lovely and Madeline’s Madeline, both of which screened at Indie Memphis, look much more experimental than Shirley. But Shirley is deeply concerned with the artistic process. Shirley’s toxic relationships with her husband and houseguests are integral to her writing. Her seduction of the increasingly confused (and increasingly pregnant) Rose is more like a systemic psychological dismantling. But when Shirley finishes her novel and discards the muse she no longer needs, Rose emerges stronger and more self-assured.

There are a lot of influences bubbling under the surface of Shirley, such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Bergman’s Persona (a film with which feminist filmmakers seem to have a love/hate relationship), but the director’s vision emerges as something more than the sum of its parts. Decker has crafted the first masterpiece of the young decade.

Shirley is showing on Hulu.