Robert Greene (2016)
Kate Plays Christine is formally more ingenious than the label ‘documentary’ might imply. Kate is the actress Kate Lyn Sheil, Christine the journalist Christine Chubbuck, whom Sheil is to portray in a movie. The actress researches her character by visiting places where Chubbuck spent time; she talks to various people who might offer helpful insights – a psychologist, a friend of the Chubbuck family, colleagues at WXLT-TV in the period leading up to Christine’s on-air suicide, as she read the news, in July 1974. As she struggles to understand better who Christine Chubbuck was, Sheil examines her own personality and (as she sees them) limitations. The talking heads include other members of the cast of the movie in which Sheil will play Chubbuck. But just as Kate Lyn Sheil finds the ‘real’ Christine Chubbuck ever more elusive, so the reality of the film within Robert Greene’s film gradually recedes. By the end, the movie in which Kate was to play Christine has virtually evaporated – if it ever existed at all, and that seems doubtful: it’s an artifice through which to describe Chubbuck’s life and legacy, and to explore an actor’s struggles to achieve truthfulness in a biopic.
Kate Lyn Sheil is new to me but she has 55 acting credits on IMDB. Many of these are in obscure indie films though Sheil has appeared in the last couple of years in, among other things, the American House of Cards and Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip. In Kate Plays Christine, she’s intelligently articulate but not very expressive: she becomes progressively less engaging as a performer, if not as a personality in her own right. It’s hard to know quite how intentional this is. The effect of Sheil’s wan screen presence is to realise the distance that she feels separates her from Christine Chubbuck, and to focus interest on the latter – Robert Greene may well have aimed to achieve both these things. Yet Sheil’s failure to convince goes beyond failing to convince herself that she can get inside Chubbuck’s head, and this made me uncomfortable. When she visits a house where Chubbuck once lived or stands on the beach where a memorial service for her took place, we’re doubly removed from reality: Sheil comes across as an actress pretending to be an actress trying to get close to the woman she’s playing. Another effect of Sheil’s underpowered acting, if you’ve seen Christine (as I had two days previously), is to make you appreciate all the more Rachel Hall’s achievement in the lead role of Antonio Campos’s film.
There’s an increasing, interesting imbalance in Robert Greene’s piece – between what feels like enervated contrivance and the impact of the mythology that’s grown up around Christine Chubbuck’s death. Early on, Kate Lyn Sheil visits and talks with an elderly woman who’ll be making her Christine wig; later, Sheil goes swimming in the ocean wearing the wig, and it keeps coming off. If this is meant as an illustration of how Christine keeps ‘getting away from’ the actress trying to inhabit her, it’s a daft one: the wig, which never looks convincing even on dry land, seems almost certain to come off underwater. The aforementioned beach scene on the site of Christine’s memorial service is accompanied by thunder and lightning. While it’s perfectly possible that the brewing storm is a spectacular atmospheric coincidence, one suspects by this stage that Greene kept a close eye on weather forecasts before deciding when to shoot the sequence. Watching footage of the real Christine Chubbuck on film is presented as a pivotal moment in Kate Lyn Sheil’s apprehension of Christine’s ‘otherness’: we’re supposed to think Kate has never seen Christine before, even though at least one of the video clips of Chubbuck currently available on YouTube was posted there several years ago.
This moment is also a letdown to the extent that the real Christine Chubbuck is hardly electrifying – not compared with Rebecca Hall, anyway. Nevertheless, Kate Plays Christine conveys biographical information and theories about Chubbuck economically and effectively. The psychologist whom Sheil meets suggests that Chubbuck resolved to attempt suicide in a way that expressed her deep personal anger through her chosen line of work. This is plausible: it’s hard to ignore the shocking pun of the phrase ‘news bulletin’ in relation to her death. It’s a subsequent meeting, between Sheil and two of the men working for WXLT-TV news at the time, that galvanises Robert Greene’s narrative. The WXLT-TV video footage of the self-shooting has never become publicly available. One of the two men featured here, although he says he knows that a recording still exists, points up the irony of its continuing concealment: Christine Chubbuck obliged viewers to see something they’d never seen before and which has never been seen since. This same witness is candid too about the morbid, ‘blood and guts’ hook of what Chubbuck did. He forced this viewer to admit this was one of the things that drew him to see Greene’s film and Christine at the London Film Festival.
This man’s brief contribution upstages what’s meant to be the climax to proceedings, in which Kate Lyn Sheil repeatedly tries and fails to enact Christine’s suicide on camera. Before she eventually ‘succeeds’, Sheil looks straight at us and summarises the issues that Kate Plays Christine has raised for her and which she feels, as an actress, she has failed to resolve. Both the acted suicide and this moment of confrontation with the audience (and perhaps, from Sheil’s point of view, with Robert Greene) feel forced and are anti-climactic – but one thing Kate Lyn Sheil says in the finale is striking. She tells us there’s no satisfying meaning to be found in Christine Chubbuck’s death – that Christine was just a sad individual. It’s ironic that this is what one infers from watching Christine but that Kate Plays Christine, chiefly through what that WXLT-TV man had to say, hints at something more.
12 October 2016
