In the rarefied realm of dueling biopics, Christine Chubbuck seems like an unexpected name to land alongside Truman Capote, Wyatt Earp, and Steve Jobs.
A reporter for a local news station in Sarasota, shes mostly famous or infamous for killing herself live on air three weeks before her 30th birthday.
Yet somehow her story is being told twice this year, more than four decades after her death: first in the headily meta documentaryKate Plays Christine, and now in director Antonio Campos stark, unsettling drama.
Credit: The Orchard
Without context or preamble, his Christine (Rebecca Hall) appears in the frame, a woman thrumming with such fierce high-wire intensity that its almost comical to watch her attempt to deliver field reports on strawberry stands and county zoning laws except, of course, that we know how terribly it will end.
Shot in the goldenrod-and-avocado palette of the 70s and dabbed with incongruous soft-rock lullabies, the movie itself is both painfully intimate and strangely opaque on the subject of mental illness, taking us deep inside Christines disintegration even as it never quite figures out what it wants to say about it.
Hall puts everything she can into the role and Michael C. Hall shines as the dopey-sweet anchorman desperate to connect with her but its hard to shake the whiff of exploitation that hangs over the retelling of a tragedy that Chubbucks own family vehemently wished not to see on screen.B
