out of all eight 2020 releases i’ve seen (lol), Shirley is by far my favorite. josephine decker has acheived auteur status — just like in Madeline’s Madeline, the camera swirls around her characters, the framing focusing on fragments of their faces, proffering a dreamy drift through the woods of vermont. it blurs the line between muse and friend and lover, and highlights the tendency of artists to take advantage of the people who inspire them most. should a muse be honored? disgusted? resentful? 

there are so many stories about eccentric older male geniuses and their pretty young muses, but this is one of the only ones i’ve seen where said genius is a woman. shirley is messy and spiteful and capricious…

When the news first broke that “Madeline’s Madeline” filmmaker Josephine Decker would be making a starry movie about the author Shirley Jackson, it was hard not to be disappointed (or at least caught by surprise) that one of the most feral, elastic, and vividly singular artists of contemporary American cinema was following her first masterpiece with something that might be classified as a biopic. Shudder. Speaking as one of Decker’s still-fervent devotees, the hope was that her next project would find her reaching deeper into her own mind instead of squeezing her immense talents into the architecture of someone else’s imagination, and the fear was that the financial demands of a period piece would constrain her uniquely generative creative process.…