Rebecca Hall gives a career-best performance in this deeply strange real-life story, written for the screen by Craig Shilowich and directed by Antonio Campos. (It is also the subject of an offbeat drama-doc, Kate Plays Christine.) This can be read as a woman’s career-crisis and humiliation created by casual misogynists, or a modern tragedy of bipolar disorder, or a chaotic, unedifying personal tale of narcissism and self-harm from which nothing can be learned. It is a measure of Hall’s intelligence and sensitivity that her performance gives you access to all of these interpretations.
Hall plays Christine Chubbuck, a Florida TV news journalist who in 1974 took her own life with a gunshot, live on air; she was apparently unhappy in her love life, was depressed generally and was deeply frustrated in her career, her more thoughtful and discursive story ideas perpetually junked in favour of sensationalism espoused by macho management. The recorded footage of this horrible event was locked away in corporate vaults, never to be seen again.
Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky denied that it was the inspiration for his 1976 movie Network, in which Peter Finch’s choleric news anchor threatened to end it all in front of the cameras. This movie is not saying that Christine Chubbuck is the Sylvia Plath of TV news journalism. In fact, Hall’s Christine reminded me a little bit of the way Juliet Stevenson played DNA scientist Rosalind Franklin in the BBC TV drama The Race for the Double Helix, a woman gritting her teeth and having to stand her ground among boorish men, storing away her ideas, and being difficult to know.
Campos creates the breezy, seedy ambience of the budget-strapped local newsroom, whose employees are electrified at the news that the network head is in town, looking for people to promote to a big job in Baltimore. Michael C Hall plays smug news anchor George; Tracy Letts is the grumpy station manager Michael; Kim Shaw is glamorous sports reporter Andrea; Tim Simons is the nerdy weatherman Steve. Christine lives at home with her mother Peg (J Smith Cameron) who has nursed her through a recent breakdown; it is a secret humiliation, as is Christine’s lack of sexual experience. Christine works in a place Ron Burgundy would have recognised: the announcers do everything but tell Florida to “stay classy” and the office politics are like James L Brooks’s Broadcast News (1987), with Christine as a kind of cross between Holly Hunter’s difficult editor and Albert Brooks’s failing lovelorn reporter.
Her own persistence, stubbornness, lack of tact and inability to compromise create a perfect storm with her terrible loneliness, obsessive crushes and her feeling that her career is being hemmed in and crushed. There is a creepiness to the date she goes on with George, who wishes only to involve her in some odd encounter group. You can see in Hall’s face the incubation of anger and despair. It is a dark, hypnotic, unsettling experience.
In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123.
In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255.
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.
