Antonio Campos
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In 1976, Paddy Chayefsky penned “Network” as a satirical spin on the Chubbuck story; in “Christine,” the title character’s suicide is her ironically complicit rejoinder to the trash-media culture that has since flourished across new media forms.
Chubbuck's 1974 suicide on a local news show in Sarasota, Fla., had satirical echoes in the film Network, an earlier teleplay version of which predates her death.
Chubbuck’s demise should not be mistaken for some kind of parable about the wages of media sensationalism – unlike, say, “Network,” which came out in 1976 and glancingly drew on certain aspects of Chubbuck’s story in its depiction of Peter Finch’s “The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves.”
Almost immediately, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky took inspiration from her act for his 1976 satire Network , but it has taken another four decades for Chubbuck’s story to be directly explored on screen.
Chubbuck’s depression and suicide fed into Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for the 1976 movie Network—she may have been feeling the same thing as “mad-as-hell” news anchor Howard Beale, rallying against a coarsening media.
Rebecca Hall’s superb title rendering makes a vital woman out of hazily remembered Florida TV news reporter Christine Chubbuck, whose mysterious 1974 on-air suicide may have influenced Oscar winner Network.
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Directed by Joel Coen
influenced The Devil All the Time (2020)
Themes Plot
To be fair, Campos, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Paulo, seem to be trying for the same combination of bleak fatalism and jet-black humor that the Coen Brothers deployed in such films as “No Country for Old Men” and “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.”
“The Devil All the Time” echoes some of the despair and viscera of Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men."
Upon its release, Pollock’s novel was compared to Cormac McCarthy’s work so it’s perhaps natural to remark on surface similarities in the movie to the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men.
There have been plenty of other examples of this being done successfully, just see No Country for Old Men (2008) or the countless noir films of the ‘40s and ‘50s.
“If it bleeds, it leads,” he says, echoing a sour cry that has resounded from “Ace in the Hole” (1951) to “Nightcrawler” (2014).
Thus Christine’s beat isn’t clearly established when the station manager, Mike (Tracy Letts), informs the anchors that the higher-ups want them to go all Nightcrawler: “If it bleeds, it leads,” Mike emphasizes.
When it had its premiere at Sundance, Christine was immediately compared to Nightcrawler and, especially, Broadcast News: Hall’s Christine Chubbuck, like Holly Hunter’s Jane Craig, is the smartest person in the room and a bundle of insecurities.
It’s not the only manner in which the movie subtly channels the mother-daughter psychodrama and extreme performance anxiety of Darren Aronofsky ’s “Black Swan” — one of several pictures with which “Christine” seems to have drawn inspiration, Sidney Lumet ’s blistering 1976 classic “Network” and Dan Gilroy’s recent “Nightcrawler” not least among them.
“Nightcrawler,” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (whose theme song Campos even inserts into the story).
It often recalls the resolution of Berlotucci’s The Sheltering Sky , perhaps not in specific practice (Pollack doesn’t cameo in the same way as Paul Bowles did in that film, and his narration is more specific to the tale rather than providing it a gorgeous coda), but it’s astonishing in own right, capturing the language and tone of the book while using its detail to enhance our perception of the characters’ deepest thoughts.
The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)
Directed by Derek Cianfrance
influenced The Devil All the Time (2020)
Visuals Plot Themes
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Devil All the Time consists of some backwoods Deliverance scenery, the airlessness of The Place Beyond the Pines , some shots swiped from Miller’s Crossing , and a general sense of wanting to be a tangled, Paul Thomas Anderson-esque rumination on brutality.
Campos steers away from arriving at 2005's Crash and instead heads toward something constructed with a poet’s eye, like The Place Beyond the Pines.
In a similar fashion to Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines, the movie examines the inescapable recycling of brutality across family trees, and does so with more coherence than was achieved by Cianfrance’s clear triptych narrative structure.
It isn’t so much hard to follow as all over the place, in need of a through line that’s more substantial than its ‘sins of the fathers’ theme (which makes it feel reminiscent, in some ways, of Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond The Pines ).
The narration – often condescending, going so far as to call one character a “sick fuck” after one heinous act – recalls the darkly funny narration of Barry Lyndon , used to both entertain us and also help us keep track of the ever-changing, ever-growing story.
Campos is probably aiming for a poignant alienation effect, giving voice to characters who barely know their own feelings, a la Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Todd Field’s Little Children .
The difference is that in those films, the Coens at least seemed interested in their characters as they moved them towards their inevitable fate while the Campos’s see theirs as nothing more than stick figures that they take perverse glee in mercilessly destroying without giving us any reason to care about either their lives or deaths or offering up any sort of notion other than to observe the corrupting force of religion, a notion that it makes over and over without any accompanying insight By the end of the film, it becomes abundantly clear that there is no real point to any of this, although the film does impart an endless omniscient narration (supplied by Pollock himself) in the manner of Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” in an increasingly desperate attempt to suggest otherwise.
The Fugitive Kind (1960)
Directed by Sidney Lumet
influenced The Devil All the Time (2020)
Characters
One wishes for a bit of some good ole’ Tennessee Williams hysteria in the dialogue, as only Robert Pattinson’s diabolical Rev. Teagardin broaches such energies (his sputtering of “Delusions!” from his pulpit is a definite highlight), an odd-casting choice not unlike Marlon Brando in the lead of 1960’s The Fugitive Kind .
When it had its premiere at Sundance, Christine was immediately compared to Nightcrawler and, especially, Broadcast News: Hall’s Christine Chubbuck, like Holly Hunter’s Jane Craig, is the smartest person in the room and a bundle of insecurities.
By turns shrilly frightening and blearily sucker-punched, her performance bears improbable comparison with Natalie Portman’s Oscar-winning “Black Swan” turn as a study of self-disarrangement from the inside out, similarly motivated by myopic professional pressure.
It’s not the only manner in which the movie subtly channels the mother-daughter psychodrama and extreme performance anxiety of Darren Aronofsky ’s “Black Swan” — one of several pictures with which “Christine” seems to have drawn inspiration, Sidney Lumet ’s blistering 1976 classic “Network” and Dan Gilroy’s recent “Nightcrawler” not least among them.
As in Michael Haneke's Hidden or David Lynch's Lost Highway, we're watching video clips we can't trust - a repeated pan across an empty corridor leaves us waiting for something hideous to happen, and it duly does, though it's not the Columbine homage we might have cause to expect.
One exception to the film’s status quo would be Robert Pattinson’s Preston Teagardin, a replacement reverend for the Russells’ church who comes up from the South but maybe actually from another planet or Alan Parker’s Angel Heart.
Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
influenced The Devil All the Time (2020)
Characters
He plays the town’s new pastor like he’s Nicolas Cage in “Peggy Sue Got Married,” with an accent from outer space and a preening self-regard that works like a defibrillator on the morose movie surrounding him.
A River Runs Through It (1992)
Directed by Robert Redford
influenced The Devil All the Time (2020)
Themes
In the tradition of films like “A River Runs Through It” or more melodramatic works like “Legends of the Fall,” Campos manages to evoke how in small communities family histories cast very long shadows.
Watching The Devil All the Time , I couldn’t help but be reminded of Ridley Scott’s The Counselor .
On the soundtrack, Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans’s low-key, organic score dances around the popular tunes and close harmony spirituals that burble from car radios, creating an ironic American Graffiti -style counterpoint to the on-screen damnation.
In the tradition of films like “A River Runs Through It” or more melodramatic works like “Legends of the Fall,” Campos manages to evoke how in small communities family histories cast very long shadows.
While actually impressively convincing, Holland ( Avengers: Endgame ) doesn’t enter proceedings until the 45-minute mark and is often sidelined, as the story explores the parallel Natural Born Killers -esque antics of Jason Clarke and Riley Keough’s outdoor photography loving couple and the arrival of Robert Pattinson’s provocative pastor Preston Teagardin.
Flipping back and forth in time as the narrative slips between Coal Creek, West Virginia, and Knockemstiff, Ohio (think Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction meets Dominic Murphy’s White Lightnin’ ), the interlacing storylines spiral around Arvin Russell (played as a young man by Tom Holland), whose father returned from the war haunted by visions of a grotesque battleground crucifixion.
Ensemble productions tend to do that, such as Magnolia (1999) or Crash (2004).
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Devil All the Time consists of some backwoods Deliverance scenery, the airlessness of The Place Beyond the Pines , some shots swiped from Miller’s Crossing , and a general sense of wanting to be a tangled, Paul Thomas Anderson-esque rumination on brutality.