Review: Christine

Christine (15)

UK/USA 2016 119 mins  Dir: Antonio Campos Cast: Rebecca Hall, Michael C. Hall, Tracy Letts, Maria Dizzia

On July 15, 1974, 29-year-old Sarasota TV news journalist Christine Chubbock blew her brains out live on air, after announcing: “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in ‘blood and guts’, and in living colour, you are going to see another first – attempted suicide.” One can only speculate about how much earlier she might have done so had she lived in the age of churnalism, clickbait, fake news and clueless management who enjoy only a passing acquaintance with the English language and favour ‘content’ over journalism. But I digress.

The main problem with turning Chubbock’s suicide into drama is that everyone knows how it’s going to end. Robert Greene’s tricksy Kate Plays Christine billed itself as a mock DVD extra, following an actress as she prepares to play the journalist in a drama that was never made. Released in the US at the same time (both films were screeend at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival), Afterschool director Antonio Campos’s much more satisfying film is a complex character study that eschews cheap psychoanalysis, resists depicting Chubbock as a noble martyr, and gives Rebecca Hall her best role to date.

Campos and debuting writer Craig Shilowich set the scene skilfully as the Watergate hearings play out in the background while ambitious perfectionist Chubbock (Hall) indulges her Woodward and Bernstein fantasies by role-playing an interview in which she puts Nixon on the spot. But she’s not an investigative reporter working for network news: she’s stuck at two-bit WZRB in Sarasota, Florida, where boss Mike (Tracy Letts) fears the wrath of the mostly absent station owner since, as he puts it so eloquently, “ratings are in the fucking toilet”. His proposed solution is to head for the gutter, in keeping with the ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ mantra. This horrifies Chubbock, who’s committed to issue-based journalism and objects to what she considers tacky fender-bender reporting.

Trouble is, as Dexter himself (Michael C. Hall, for it is he) tells her: “You’re not always the most approachable person.” He’s the charming, clubbable, slightly dim news anchor in thrall to faddy Transactional Analysis (“Learn your life script,” he advises) on whom she has an improbable crush. And he’s not wrong. She’s a difficult, prickly, intimacy-shunning virgin who lives with her mum, of whose pot-smoking and boyfriends she disapproves, following an unexplained retreat from Boston. It doesn’t help that despite her drive and commitment, Chubbock’s flinty demeanour hardly makes her a TV natural and proves a positive disadvantage when it comes to faking empathy or humour. This being the ’70s, there’s another concern that Mike is quick to identify: “Your problem is that you’re a feminist!”

Finally given a role that she can really get her teeth into, Hall brilliantly conveys Chubbock’s social awkwardness and mounting mental disintegration as the big money shot looms. Like Natalie Portman’s Jackie, this is a compelling performance that never eclipses the supporting players. Resplendent in an authentic period suit, Michael C. Hall transcends Ron Burgundy-isms to emerge as a sympathetic character rather than the sleazy predator one might anticipate, while Tracy Letts makes a splendidly authentic newsroom tyrant.

Chubbock’s suicide was allegedly the inspiration for Paddy Chayefsky’s searing, still relevant Network and there’s plenty here for fans of movies about journalism to savour, with the newsroom dynamic captured every bit as effectively as it was in Spotlight. What makes it even more grimly fascinating is that this was an era in which now-familiar arguments about the ethics of TV reporting were first rehearsed. There’s a perhaps intentional nod to Nightcrawler when Chubbock acquires a police radio scanner and attempts to get ahead by becoming a rather inept ambulance chaser. A reference to An American Family, which opened the reality TV floodgates, reminds us that it was broadcast just a year before these events. When Chubbock objects to a downmarket segment about fatties being given shock therapy, which she describes as ‘demeaning’, she’s reminded pointedly that the audience she’s supposed to represent is gobbling this shit up. And here in the digital era, every working hack will recognise the scene in which she accuses her panicking, fearful boss of regurgitating jargon that he doesn’t understand.