You can’t think of two more
dissimilar film projects than the 2018 indie comedy, Support the Girls , and
the oblique new thriller, Shirley. They have, though, one thing in
common: both feature mid-life women in positions of authority who are striving
mightily to cope with the hand they were dealt.
Support the Girls is a big-hearted (and big-busted) romp set in a
down-home sports bar that features nubile young waitresses in short shorts and
skimpy pink T-shirts. (Think a localized version of Hooters.) The clientele is
mostly blue-collar: they’re loud and raucous, but generally harmless, and
everyone is constantly being reminded that this is a family place. Riding herd
over the goings-on is general manager and mother hen Lisa (the highly appealing
Regina Hall), who in the course of one highly-charged day faces every
imaginable problem, from a cable-TV malfunction to a would-be burglar in the
air duct to a ditsy employee who’s just violated company rules by getting a
huge tattoo of basketball star Steph Curry on her midriff.
Though Lisa is quick to
listen to everyone else’s problems, she’s got plenty of troubles of her own, including
a depressed spouse who’s on the brink of moving out. She tries to organize an
off-the-books carwash to assist a battered young woman who’s a member of her
crew, but the good deed blows up in her face. And her redneck boss can be crude
and downright nasty. It doesn’t help that she’s African-American. So she feels rankled by such absurd policies as the
rule that allows only one waitress of color on any shift. By the time she’s
been fired (yet again) by her capricious superior, there seems nothing for it
but to interview for a job with an upstart rival hot spot named Man Cave. What
keeps her going, though, is the camaraderie she feels with the “girls” who have
been under her wing.
Sbirley couldn’t be more different in its tone and its
atmosphere. It’s basically a four-hander, set in the leafy college town of
Bennington, Vermont circa 1950. Two couples living in the same large, rambling
house form an unlikely quartet. Rose and Fred are newlyweds. She is newly
pregnant; he has been hired by Bennington College as a young prof and assistant
to a faculty superstar, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman (played with panache and
conviction by Michael Stuhlbarg). Stanley’s deeply neurotic wife and verbal
sparring partner is Shirley Jackson, already the author of an unforgettably
eerie story, “The Lottery.” She’s on the brink of writing her second novel and
moving toward such major gothic fiction as The Haunting of Hill House and
We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Shirley is played by the hugely
versatile Elisabeth Moss, lightyears away from her naive but determined Peggy Olson in Mad Men. Though the
philandering Stanley has his pick of the campus coeds, the center of the ménage
is Shirley, with her barbed witticisms, unexpected kindnesses, and tendency to
dominate any gathering she’s in. There’s something of a Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf quality at work, with the older couple manipulating the
younger one for their own emotional satisfaction. But Shirley is also—first and
foremost—a writer, and her fascination with Rose takes on a life of its own as
she weaves it into her current manuscript.
The real Jackson/Hyman
marriage, as chronicled in Ruth Franklin’s prize-winning biography, contained
four children who are definitely not in evidence here. But the perverse aspects
of the actual marital relationship are used by the filmmakers to shed a dark
light on this fascinating film.
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| Michael Stuhlbarg and Elisabeth Moss (she looks remarkably like the real Shirley Jackson) |
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