I'm starting to wonder if all those years as Peggy Olson did a number of Elisabeth Moss. She rose to prominence as Peggy, one of the great unawarded Emmy performances. It's a wonderfully rounded but ultimately restrained role. Much of her career since that has seemed to be in direct response to that. June in The Handmaid's Tale is all about her simmering rage. Becky Something in Her Smell is a performance that literally can't go too big. Her roles in Us and The Kitchen are similarly loud. Then there's Shirley, which is stagey and big too. I get the sense that these later performances reflect Moss' interests as a performer - and she is generally great in the roles. I wonder if years of holding back with Peggy Olson is the reason why she approaches these more recent roles with such ferocity.
Shirley is kind of like if Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was stretched out over several months. It's a fictionalized biopic about Shirley Jackson (Moss) and Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg). They are depicted as a combative and manipulative couple. They invite the young couple played by Odessa Young and Logan Lerman to live with them only so they can toy with them. I can see why all the actors (save Lerman, who has the least to do) would jump at the chance to play these characters. They are stagy performances and big characters.
I wasn’t enthralled by the movie though. I got the point of Moss and Stuhlbarg's characters pretty early, and my understanding of them didn't change much throughout the movie. Director Josephine Decker directs it interestingly enough. She really does approach this with the thought, "what does the life of the woman who wrote The Lottery look like?". The story of the film itself did little to capture my attention though.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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