By Susan Granger
Special to WestportNow
Now that the Academy is considering ‘streaming’ films, Elisabeth Moss (TVs “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Mad Men”) could be an Oscar contender for her ferocious performance in “Shirley” as mercurial writer Shirley Jackson, perhaps best known for her allegorical short story “The Lottery” in the New Yorker in 1948.
In the early 1950s, newlywed Rose (Odessa Young) and Fred (Logan Lerman) Nemser arrive in Bennington, Vermont. Ambitious Fred has snagged a coveted position as teaching assistant for lecherous literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), the manipulative, domineering husband of Shirley Jackson (Moss).
Until proper housing can be arranged, they’ll live with Shirley & Stanley, doing chores around the cluttered, ivy-covered house. That job falls primarily to pregnant Rose who, instead of auditing Bennington College classes, cooks and cleans, watching Fred cavort among pretty coeds.
Since Shirley is abusively agoraphobic, repelled by social contact, vulnerable Rose becomes her caretaker/companion, as Shirley voices the hope that Rose’s baby will be a boy, noting: “The world is too cruel to girls.”
Shirley is currently obsessed with researching a new novel (published in 1951 as “Hangsaman”), based on the real-life disappearance of Bennington student Paula Jean Welden. Did she commit suicide? Was she murdered? Or did she simply decide to disappear on a mountain hike?
Meanwhile, smarmy Stanley oozes intellectual superiority over “entitled” Fred, dismissing his dissertation as “derivative,” explaining: “Originality is the brilliant alchemy of critical thought and creativity.”
Adapted by Sarah Gubbins from Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel and obliquely directed as a psychodrama by Josephine Decker (“Madeline’s Madeline”), it’s unfocused, deliberately fragmented, pivoting around deception and betrayal.
Taking a page from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” Shirley & Stanley brutally bait their hapless houseguests. And the music of Leadbelly — aka Huddie William Ledbetter — punctuates many scenes.
FYI: Shirley Jackson wrote six novels, including “The Haunting of Hill House” (1958) and “We Always Lived in the Castle” (1962). Although absent from the screenplay, Shirley & Stanley had four children.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Shirley” is a slyly speculative, sinister 6, available on Hulu, iTunes and Amazon and in drive-in theaters.
If you enjoyed “The Twilight Zone,” “The Outer Limits” and other 1950s sci-fi anthologies, you’ll respond to “The Vast of Night,” an ‘episode’ of the fictional “Paradox Theater” TV show, beginning as a Rod Serling-like announcer intones: “You are entering a realm between clandestine and forgotten…”
In Cayuga, New Mexico — population: 492 — Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick) is a high school student who’s excited about learning how to operate her new tape recorder. She works the nighttime shift at the town’s telephone switchboard office while listening to her pal Everett (Jake Horowitz), the fast-talking DJ at the local AM radio station WOTW.
Suddenly, a call comes in from a frantic woman reporting large objects hovering above her house, so Fay contacts Everett, who notes that WOTW’s signal is being interrupted by a mysterious audio transmission that sounds like faint, mumbling voices, punctuated by static.
When Fay subsequently hears the same unidentifiable sound on one of the switchboard lines, she patches it through to Everett, who broadcasts it, asking if any listener recognizes it.
A veteran, Billy (Bruce Davis), responds, rambling about a weird Air Force experience involving tunnels being dug at a remote desert location for an alien aircraft. Then elderly Mabel Blanche (Gail Cronauer) adds more paranormal details, repeatedly reciting an indecipherable chant in a strange language.
Co-writers James Montague (the pseudonym used by Oklahoma City director Andrew Patterson) and Craig W. Sanger, his researcher, cram far too many monologues into several scenes, slowing the momentum considerably.
Yet Patterson, working with Chilean cinematographer M.I. Littin-Menz, maintains an appealing retro ambience, complete with Cold War suspicion about the Soviets and paranoia about UFOs carrying extraterrestrials. But the mounting visual tension is interrupted by far too many fade-to-black sequences.
On the Granger Gauge, “The Vast of Night” is a strange, spooky 6, streaming on Amazon Prime.
If you’re into binge-watching, the ‘alternative reality’ miniseries “The Plot Against America” is not only compelling but also timely, detailing the dangers of electing a politically naive, ‘celebrity’ President, who subsequently forges dubious international alliances and enables prejudiced supporters to commit hate crimes.
Adapting Philip Roth’s sinister, semi-autobiographical 2004 novel, David Simon and Ed Burns have created a cautionary tale about anti-Semitism in the United States, embodied by aviator Charles Lindbergh (Ben Cole), a Nazi sympathizer who catapults from national hero to the presidency in 1940 on an isolationist platform of keeping the U.S. out of World War II.
Set in Newark, New Jersey, the story revolves around young Philip Levin (Azhy Robertson), his inflexible insurance-agent father Herman (Morgan Spector), worried mother Bess (Zoe Kazan), older brother Sandy (Caleb Malis), and hotheaded cousin Alvin (Anthony Boyle).
Pivotal to the plot is Bess’s spinster sister Evelyn (Winona Ryder), who falls in love with Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro), a Lindbergh supporter who advocates moving American Jews to rural areas of the country so they’ll become “Americanized” and abandon their Jewish customs.
To launch this insidious program, Jewish teenagers, like Sandy, are enticed by the Office of American Absorption to spend summer vacation on farms in the Midwest. (In reality, however, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt who advocated a similar form of social engineering through population resettlement.)
Directors Minkie Spiro and Thomas Schlamme augment the authenticity by their cinematic use of extensive newsreel footage, adopting an allegorical tone that feels chillingly relevant today.
Unfortunately, this show tanked in the ratings when it was released mid-March, losing to the true crime reality series “Tiger King.” And if you’re intrigued by the ‘alternative reality’ concept, check out Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle,” the Netflix limited series “Hollywood” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.”
On the Granger Gauge, “The Plot Against America” is an opportune, evocative 8, streaming as a six-hour miniseries on HBO.
(Editor’s Note: Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has been on radio/television as an anchorwoman and movie/drama critic for many years. See her reviews at www.susangranger.com.)
