Chris­tine – first look review

Rebec­ca Hall wows in this grip­ping account of the Chris­tine Chub­buck sto­ry, the Amer­i­can TV reporter who com­mit­ted sui­cide live on air in 1974. More than an accom­plished peri­od-cum-bio­graph­i­cal piece, direc­tor Anto­nio Cam­pos’ par­tial­ly fic­tion­alised tale acts as both a fable about mod­ern jour­nal­ism and a time­ly reminder of the intrin­sic link between men­tal health and firearms that has become cen­tral to the debate around gun con­trol in America.

Chub­buck worked at a local news sta­tion in Sara­so­ta, a beat where her most pop­u­lar reports con­cerned the likes of local straw­ber­ry sales. She yearned for more sig­nif­i­cant sto­ries – in the open­ing scene we see her pre­tend­ing to inter­view Pres­i­dent Nixon. In her own talk show seg­ment, Sun­coast Digest, she tries to intro­duce weighty issues such as agri­cul­tur­al reform, but her boss Michael (a ter­rif­ic Tra­cy Letts) instead cas­ti­gates her increas­ing­ly abstract pitch­es, call­ing for ​“juci­er sto­ries” to rem­e­dy the ​“fuck­ing dire sit­u­a­tion” of the station’s low ratings.

Chub­buck suf­fered from recur­ring bouts of depres­sion owing to bipo­lar dis­or­der (as we now know it), and as the TV reports become more sen­sa­tion­alised, so her view of events around her shifts. She keeps up with the macho nature of the news­room, but can’t shake off an unre­quit­ed crush on lead news anchor George (Michael C Hall) that defines her rela­tion­ship to it, nor does she have the respect she needs from her loud­mouth news edi­tor – Chub­buck nev­er had a shot at pro­mo­tion to a bet­ter sta­tion in Bal­ti­more. The gap between expec­ta­tion and real­i­ty lies at the heart of her downfall.

The ques­tion of why she killed her­self doesn’t fuel the dra­ma as much as the man­ner in which she car­ried out the act. On cam­era, Chub­buck recit­ed a speech as she reached for a gun: ​“In keep­ing with Chan­nel 40’s pol­i­cy of bring­ing you the lat­est in ​‘blood and guts’… you are going to see anoth­er first – attempt­ed sui­cide.” It’s no sur­prise the event inspired Pad­dy Chayefsky’s script for Net­work, Sid­ney Lumet’s satir­i­cal mas­ter­piece about TV news sell­ing its soul for rat­ings. Or as Chayef­sky is alleged to have said: ​“Tele­vi­sion will do any­thing for a rat­ing… any­thing.” When pop­u­lar­i­ty is every­thing, what is an iso­lat­ed and unloved per­son to do?

Some pac­ing issues aside, Cam­pos doesn’t seek to answer all of the secrets to Chubbuck’s deci­sions, and indeed casts a shade of Water­gate-era para­noia over the pro­ceed­ings (Chub­buck point­ed­ly says there are ​“dif­fer­ent ver­sions of our­selves try­ing to be the same us”). It’s embell­ished by pro­duc­tion design­er Scott Kuzio’s flaw­less re-enact­ment of ​’70s TV jour­nal­ism, as well as Joe Anderson’s beige-pal­let­ed cin­e­matog­ra­phy. But this is a film that belongs to Rebec­ca Hall. Chub­buck is entire­ly sym­pa­thet­ic in Hall’s inter­pre­ta­tion – fun­ny, too, show­ing a sar­don­ic wit that pla­cates the film’s occa­sion­al overem­pha­sis on her men­tal con­di­tion. When she even­tu­al­ly picks up the pis­tol, you’re urg­ing her not to do it – as is the case with the 60 per cent of gun-relat­ed deaths by sui­cide still occur­ring across Amer­i­ca today.