Nolan Fans

Everyone knows how Christine Chubbuck’s story ends; why it ended that way is another question altogether, and one even a film as astute and exquisitely considered as Antonio Campos’ “Christine” can’t hope to answer in full. Instead, it’s a real-life drama of jangling variables and charged blank spaces, teasing out the tangled personal yearnings and failings that somehow led a smart, attractive, 29-year-old news reporter to blow her brains out on live television in 1974. Far from the austere death march it might threaten to be on paper, this is a thrumming, heartsore, sometimes viciously funny character study, sensitive both to the singularities of Chubbuck’s psychological collapse and the indignities weathered by any woman in a 1970s newsroom. Invigorated by a top-drawer ensemble, with Rebecca Hall discomfitingly electric in the best role she’s yet been offered, this should easily become Campos’ most widely distributed work to date.

Hall completely immerses herself in the role of Christine Chubbuck in Campos’s stark retelling of the story that led to the television news reporter’s suicide live on air, aged 29, in 1974. It’s one of two films on the subject at Sundance this year – the other is the documentary Kate Plays Christine.

Though it might appear to be a one-woman showcase, “Christine” is also a delicately balanced and apportioned ensemble piece — as perceptive in its way as Tom McCarthy’s far less fractious “Spotlight” in studying the human machinery that marks and makes news. Letts steams with exasperation without succumbing to cartoonish dinosaur fury. Maria Dizzia, unexpectedly handed a crucial emotive stretch of the film, does invaluable work from the sidelines as Chubbuck’s notional protegee, sympathetic to her superior’s disintegration while keeping a tactical distance. And Michael C. Hall is typically excellent as an alpha-male-in-training who manipulates affections more brutally than he means to: A soused, insecure monologue in which he unpacks a recurring nightmare about shoelaces is among the film’s most inspired moments of conjoined scripting and performance.

The Film Stage ‏@TheFilmStage
Antonio Campos' 'Christine' hits theaters October 14th.