Antonio Campos (2016)

Christine Chubbuck was a TV news reporter, who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, worked for a succession of regional news channels.  The last of these was WXLT-TV, based in Sarasota, Florida.  On 15 July 1974, Chubbuck was reading a morning news bulletin when a film reel – showing footage of a shooting incident in a local restaurant – jammed.   Chubbuck paused then said to camera:

‘In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in “blood and guts”, and in living color, you are going to see another first – attempted suicide.’

She produced a gun from the bag she had under the desk and shot herself in the head.  She died in hospital fourteen hours later, a few weeks short of her thirtieth birthday.  More than four decades on, two films about Chubbuck have appeared almost simultaneously.  Both were screened for the first time in January 2016 at Sundance; both featured in the programme for this year’s London Film Festival[1].  Antonio Campos’s Christine is a biographical drama, with Rebecca Hall in the title role.  Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine is a documentary of sorts, in which the actress Kate Lyn Sheil prepares to portray Chubbuck in a screen dramatisation of her life and death.

‘If it bleeds, it leads’, is the journalistic motto of the WXLT-TV newsroom boss Mike Nelson (Tracy Letts) in Christine.  You might think Chubbuck’s television first – with the reinforcement of her ‘blood and guts’ comment – was intended partly as a statement about the queasy symbiosis between broadcast news media menus and the public appetites that they feed.  Chubbuck’s act is alleged to have inspired elements of, and the most famous line in, Paddy Chayefsky’s script for Network (1976), when the news anchor Howard Beale yells, ‘I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’  But I don’t think I’d heard of Christine Chubbuck before this year and I’m not sure how widely she’s regarded as some kind of moral exemplar, rather than as an unhappy and unlucky individual.  If she’s only the latter, is she a big enough subject for a biopic?  Antonio Campos and the screenwriter Craig Shilowich, while suggesting that aspects of her professional life contributed to Christine’s decision to end her life, barely pursue the idea that the manner of her death exposed shocking truths about the world in which she worked.   Her personal miseries entirely dominate the story.  I heard someone remark, as we came out of the LFF screening, ‘Well, she was obviously depressed’.  That sounds like a very limited and obvious message to carry away from a drama in which the protagonist commits suicide but it’s fair enough:  it isn’t clear what else Campos’s movie means to say.

The last weeks of Chubbuck’s life coincided with the climax to Watergate (Richard Nixon resigned about three weeks after her death).  The film starts with a technical studio test, during which Christine pretends she’s conducting an interview with Nixon; near the end of the movie, a reference to his paranoia is made to imply that, in this respect at least, the President and Christine Chubbuck were somewhat kindred spirits.  Even so, you feel Watergate is, for Campos and Shilowich, little more than a handy suggestive motif.  The connections between the sexual politics of WXLT-TV and Christine’s personal life are more substantial.   The newsroom is largely a man’s world:  when the long-serving anchor George Ryan (Michael C Hall) gets a better job, at a station in Baltimore, the transfer package also includes his WXLT-TV colleague Andrea (Kim Shaw), described as ‘a little firecracker’.  Christine, on the other hand, has a forbidding, witchy look (images of the real Christine Chubbuck make clear that Rachel Hall’s Morticia hair, eyebrows and pallor are hardly an exaggeration).  She’s frightened and isolated – concerned about her gynaecological health, her inability to form relationships, her virginity.  There’s one sequence – perhaps the most memorable in Christine – in which the boundary between her private and public lives is blurred imaginatively.  As she prepares to leave the restaurant where she’s been dining alone, Christine approaches two other diners, a young man and woman.  ‘You seem very much in love’, she tells the politely puzzled couple.  Her tone is that of a professionally interested journalist.  What impels her towards their table is something more personally urgent:  Christine needs to know how on earth it’s possible to have this kind of easy intimacy.

Few other scenes in Christine compare although one or two turn out better in the event than in the conception.  George persuades Christine to go out for the evening:  after dinner, he takes her along to a meeting of the transactional analysis therapy group he regularly attends.  It’s an improbable climax to a date, comically reminiscent of the ‘Rhythm of Life’ sequence in Sweet Charity and used for some facile satire of the therapy group and of George’s self-serving moral compass.  The stated principles of transactional analysis – manage your expectations in order to manage your life – run counter to what George said in his cups to Christine at a Fourth of July party, and to the news of his promotion, which he breaks to her as he drops her off at the end of their evening out.  Even so, the exchange of questions between Christine and one of the regulars at the therapy group gets over powerfully the heroine’s preoccupations and the impasse in which she finds herself.   Straight after her outing with George, Christine visits Bob Andersen (John Cullum), who owns WXLT-TV and other stations, and begs him to send her to Baltimore too (he tells that Andrea is already on the ticket).  I may have misunderstood but I found this episode confusingly staged.  It seems George has dropped Christine off right outside Andersen’s place without her asking him to do so; then it appears she’s in such disarray that she knocks on the front door without knowing who lives inside.

With her increasingly stiff carriage and formidable internal force, Rebecca Hall does extraordinary work as Christine.  The difficulty with the performance is that the thin script and sketchy. direction of Christine make it too much of a showcase.  Christine’s mother Peg (J Smith-Cameron) is worried the mental illness from which her daughter suffered a few years back ‘in Boston’ (it gets to sound a bit like Chinatown) is returning.  Hall makes Christine’s psychological problems so salient that her behaviour, particularly in her exchanges with her boss, does seem unreasonable – and it’s therefore hard to see her as a victim of male chauvinism.  The most poignant moments of Rebecca Hall’s portrait come when Christine appears normal enough for people not to realise how far away she is from feeling it.  The contrasts between Christine and the pliant, sexually relaxed and active Peg, with whom she shares her home, are nothing if not obvious.  In her first scene, as Peg waits in a café for her daughter to arrive, J Smith-Cameron looks as if she’s getting ready to start acting.  This is likely the result of inattentive editing on Antonio Campos’s part rather than the fault of Smith-Cameron:  something similar happens at the Fourth of July party when Michael C Hall seems to be winding up for a prepared big moment.  Both these actors are physically convincing, however, and increasingly persuasive.

As in Wiener-Dog, Tracy Letts makes a two-dimensional character one-dimensional but Maria Dizzia is good as Jean Reed, who also works at WXLT-TV and who tries unavailingly to befriend Christine.  When Jean’s feeling unhappy, she tells Christine, she eats ice cream and listens to cheerful songs – the kind of remark that immediately strikes you as likely to come in useful at a later stage, as this one does.  Antonio Campos’s choice of contemporary songs for the soundtrack is mostly appropriate without being jarringly so (‘Rock Your Baby’, ‘Annie’s Song’, ‘Everything I Own,’ ‘Love is All Around’) but he goes off-key in the sequence that leads into the film’s closing titles.  After Christine’s death, Jean comes back to her apartment and gets some ice cream from the freezer.  She turns on the television and switches channels to avoid news of Christine:  we hear the theme song from The Mary Tyler Moore Show (‘You’re Gonna Make It After All’).  This was the first American sitcom to feature as the central character an unmarried, independent professional woman – Mary Richards, who works at a Minneapolis TV news station.  As if that wasn’t enough, we also hear the standard voiceover ‘This show was recorded in front of a live audience.’  The ironic aptness is not only crude but unconvincing in relation to the sensitive Jean Reed, who would have been aware of and oppressed by it.  She would have switched channels again.

10 October 2016

[1] The screenings of Christine and Kate Plays Christine that I went to were both at the Vue Cinema in Leicester Square, where I experienced what is nowadays, for me, a very rare difficulty.  The dialogue was super-audible – resoundingly, almost oppressively so early on in Christine (and to a lesser extent in Kate Plays Christine).  I so often complain about the reverse problem that I felt bad resenting this.  I got used to it after a while but Vue does seem to have an unusually powerful sound system …