On July 15, 1974, Florida newscaster Christine Chubbuck took her own life while broadcasting live on air. This nearly mythical event in television history was a cultural flashpoint and symbolic summation of a tempestuously transforming culture. But it has been complicated by its status as a grotesque tragedy. Fascination with the incident is hopelessly entwined with the qualities that make it uncomfortable to approach, the macabre aura deepened further by the fact that no footage appears to remain of the suicide. The incident has spawned two recent movies released within months of each other, each its own object lesson in the perils of semi-fictional storytelling. Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine, told mostly from the perspective of actress Kate Lyn-Shiel (playing herself), is a strangely convoluted, semi-fictional film posed as a self-defeating attempt to comprehend the shooting. Antonio Campos’ Christine, on the other hand, tackles the event head on, attempting to explain what led this woman to such a point of exhibitionist desperation. The results are often captivating but tripped up by an approach that can’t help but feel exploitative.
Campos’ film further indulges in the sort of veiled but absolutist finger-pointing as 2008’s Afterschool, in which the internet was imagined as the lurking impetus behind our modern state of expansive personal disconnection. Here, such disconnection is embodied in the soulless cesspool of TV news circa 1974, where the mounting pursuit of empty spectacle over content mirrors the interpersonal crises of a society suffering from the morning-after of the peace and love movement. Envisioning Christine as a character whose struggles are symptomatic of those of the era in which she lived is the sort of inadvisable maneuver Greene’s film seemed so concerned about, and this representative method indeed leads Campos’ movie into dangerous territory.
The brief reenactments of Kate Plays Christine lapsed into deliberately bathetic soap-opera theatrics, couched inside a larger examination of why this story even needs to be told. It’s an important question thatChristine doesn’t quite answer, and while it never verges into melodrama, its prestige indie housing is an equivalently offensive guise, smoothing down rough edges to suit modern understanding of mental health issues. Campos’ film is most guilty of crushing down Chubbuck’s story into a digestible package centered around a metaphoric fight for journalistic purity against lowering standards of broadcast news. It doesn’t help that the story of the motivated journalist driven from high-brow issues into the murky waters of human interest profiles was already covered in an episode of The Simpsons.
Early on, Christine takes shape as a modern rejoinder to the journalistic fetishism of All The President’s Men, a coruscation of a surface-obsessed culture that desires the appearance of gravity without the effort required to earn such a reputation. The film opens with an apparent interview of Richard Nixon, the period gold standard for untrustworthy, ineffectual leadership, a discussion which is quickly shown to be Chubbuck talking to herself in an empty studio. That sense of inherent emptiness persists throughout, as Woodward and Bernstein have their names dropped during the journalistic equivalent of ambulance chasing, and as our increasingly angry protagonist falls further into the darkness of depression.
Beyond her internal issues, Christine also butts up against the immovable obstacle of her incurious functionary boss, played by Tracy Letts as a textured, surprisingly human variation on the awful authoritarian he inhabited for the recent Indignation. Less complex is the film’s symbolic sub-structure, which relies on an abundance of strained metaphors: from a symbolic puppet show to symbolic fake flowers to a symbolic, potentially infertilizing ovarian cyst for good measure. Things do improve as Christine progresses, moving from over-determined narrative devices to something more interesting as the character grows more unhinged.
Hall’s performance plays out this thread marvelously, conveying the peaks and valleys of sporadic depression with immense gravity and a steely sense of resolve, allowing the character to almost single-handedly burst out of the reductive narrative the film has constructed around her. The destruction of this studied period aesthetic, via a painfully raw performative coup in which the protagonist’s path toward self-destruction derails the mannered passion play going on around her, almost makes Christine feel artistically valid, its leering curiosity and insulting simplification blown apart by sheer emotive force. Yet this overwhelmingly positive quality, even when surrounded by a series of nearly-as-impressive supporting performances, still can’t overcome the sterility of the film’s bottled recreation of history, leaving Hall’s gripping performance as stranded and alone as the movie imagines Christine was herself.
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