Being brutally honest, I have no idea what this film was trying to be. Was it trying to be a biopic or a fictional drama. When I write reviews I tend to avoid looking at other peoples reviews before writing my own as I want my thoughts to be entirely mine and not me repurposing other peoples opinions into my own but after finishing Shirley I had to see what other people had to say about this film. One praise that came up is that Shirley is a deconstruction of the biopic and this praise confused me as when I think of biopic I think of the films that dramatises a real story while being some what of an accurate telling like Rush or Straight Outta Compton. So applying that to Shirley if many of the main story beats revolve around a couple who are entirely fictional is it really a biopic?
Maybe this opinion comes from me not watching a lot of biopics and not having a true understanding of the genre but still ignoring whether its a biopic or not, in my opinion I only found the acting to be the only great aspect of this film. Elizabeth Moss is really great and prevents the film from being a complete disaster in my eyes. The rest of the cast are also good but Elizabeth Moss performance honestly steals the show. The film is well made, I thought the way the film looks at times to be visual interesting to some degree but I felt the jump cut editing that is used at times just didn’t work well. Honestly I cannot see what people loved about this film. I found it to be very boring and confusing for me it was more sleeping material than entertainment.
