Christine (2016)

Content by Tony Macklin. Originally published on November 10, 2016 @ tonymacklin.net.

Christine is a dreary character study about an unpleasant character.

How do I make this a somewhat favorable review?

I'll give it a try. Christine is based on an actual person and notorious event. The acting is first-rate, the contemporary music of 1974 is artfully used, and the themes have relevance, if you go beyond the surface.

Christine is the tale of Christine Chubbuck (Rebecca Hall), who is a psychologically-disturbed, emotionally-addled 29-year old virgin. She left Boston in a damaged state. She works for a small television-news station in Sarasota, Florida. She lives with her mother.

Christine is driven to strive for success. But she is moody, aggressive, haggard and anti-social.

She is obsessed with her career, but the terms of the station and its manager Michael (Tracy Letts) are not her terms. She flounders trying to deal with them.

Today, in 2016, news analysis is almost totally propaganda. There are endless tag-team spinners -- panels of pundits overseen by rude hosts. Even capable hosts, such as Don Lemon, have to wallow in the morass of "expertise."

1974 was a different time.

Christine focuses on a year that news coverage was undergoing drastic change. Christine Chubbuck was swept up in it.

On television screens, throughout the film, Watergate coverage is heard in the distance. Investigative reporting -- e.g., Woodward and Bernstein -- was at its apogee.

But local news was changing. Christine wanted to do think pieces, but she was assigned human interest puff pieces, such as the local Strawberry Festival and a lady who raised chickens. Then she was challenged to do "blood and guts" impact coverage.

In 1974 Christine wanted to be an investigative reporter. She wanted to transcend human interest stories. "I'm doing issue and character pieces," she says.

The station manager tells her, "Just make your stories juicy."

A police captain says to her, "I think your show is great. You do these think pieces -- they are so positive."

The irony is telling.

Today there's little place for investigative reporting.

Today, at most television stations and newspapers, the staffs of investigative reporters have been shut down. Investigative reporting is a dim memory.

In 2016 doesn't every local newscast seem to begin with a murder, a shooting, a fatal accident? Or all three? And aren't they introduced by a man or woman who is almost giddy at what is to come?

Giddy people used to do the weather; now they are on the anchor desk.

As Christine tries to evolve, her life is a downward spiral. "My life is a cesspool," she tells her mother.

Her final act is a fateful striking out at the system that is choking her.

Christine was adeptly directed by Antonio Campos from a screenplay by Craig Shilowich.

Rebecca Hall, as Christine, starkly portrays a woman who is becoming unhinged by failure and disappointment. Her co-workers are supportive, but can't redeem her. Michael C. Hall plays George Ryan, who makes a steady effort at helping his colleague.

Her mother is played by J. Smith Cameron (also the mother on television's Rectify.) And Tracy Letts gives a strong rendering to Michael who is trying to get the station to survive. Letts is the bard of unpleasant movies. He wrote the play August: Osage County, which became the foremost unpleasant film of 2013. Now he's in Christine.

At the end of Christine, a co-worker is at home eating strawberry ice cream and watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show on an off-screen television set.

Christine Chubbuck is the anti-Mary Tyler Moore. The Strawberry Festival turns to ice cream. And the musical theme of the popular sit-com wafts through the scene.

Unlike Mary Tyler Moore, Christine doesn't soar. She falters and falls.

In the movie, so does news coverage.