But Merrell's tale, apparently with her consent, was wildly reconfigured, and, the Rose that rides on the train with Fred (Logan Lerman) toward Bennington in the film is radically different than the Rose who begins her narration in the book: A nice anticipatory train ride to a New England town becomes, in the film, crude. Rose is seen reading the New Yorker edition (June 1948) that contains Jackson's "The Lottery," and we watch as her expression becomes ever more delighted at what she's reading, odd in itself. She finishes and commences a brief exchange with Fred about her reading:
Rose: They stone her to death.
Fred: Are you reading the Shirley story?
Rose: The whole town -- even her own children -- they all stoned her.
Fred: That's creepy.
Rose: That's terrific. (smiles)
A moment later, Rose wants to get her rocks off after reading the story and is moving her hand to Fred's inner thigh, until they both head back-train and join the Mile Long Club (D = R*T). In the first minute of the film?
Then they get off the train, move through town on foot, pass some boys tossing stones in an alley -- one of them wearing an eye patch (which I thought funny) -- and then arrive at the Hyman house, in party mode, and pass among others -- (spoiler alert!!) Ralph Ellison and his attractive partner. Ellison is shown for 4 seconds. In the whole movie. The first thing I wondered is how the actor playing him, Edward O'Blenis, a breakdancer from the Bronx, would want the credit he's given at IMDB. 4 seconds? Then, poof, he's the invisible man again.
It gets worse. Aside from putting the climax at the beginning of the movie, Merrell went along (presumably) with Gubbins's plan to amp up Shirley's psychological profile. What is a somewhat eccentric, occasionally snobby, struggling writer, with four kids, in the book, is turned into a kind of childless monster or psychopath undergoing some kind of disturbed withdrawal -- until Rose arrives. In fact, Stan (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Shirley come across as a Michael Haneke-inspired couple who like to play with their guests -- either of them ruining a breezy conversation at the table with an intentionally barbed and poisonous take-down comment, just to see the reaction of the target. Elizabeth Moss's Shirley expression, afterward, looking like an impression of Jodie Comer's Villanelle (from Killing Eve). Speaking of poetic license. At one point, Shirley enquires of Rose at dinner, in front of Fred, if she'd told him she was pregnant before wedding him.
Fred and Rose arrive at a time when Paula Jean Welden, a Bennington student, has gone missing -- posters are on trees, there is talk, and Rose, being drawn closer to the mystery that is Shirley, begins to suspect the couple's involvement in foul play. In the book, Shirley humorously calls herself a witch (her acerbic ways and fiction about horror have put people off); she's into Tarot, mushrooms, herbs, folklore.
But in the film, she pulls Rose in. She performs a Tarot reading and slaps down three Hanged Man cards in a row; her eyes chill as she gazes at Rose. The latter freaked out by the 'reading', and innocently unaware that Tarot decks have only one Hanged Man card, one of the most potent cards in the deck; Shirley is playing Rose and doesn't tell her what the array means (Nothing) as she continues to hold her wonder. Is she a psycho or a psychic, or both? Shirley plays bonding games, pretending to eat a 'poisonous' mushroom to f*ck with Rose. They go on a walk in the woods to where the Welden girl was last seen alive and the director fucks with us -- Rose and Shirley standing at a cliff's edge (Shirley holding Rose's baby), then Rose is gone, then suddenly Shirley's waking from a dream. She didn't kill Rose, but we wonder why she's dreaming of it.
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