Christine (2016)
Directed by Antonio Campos
In 1974, television reporter Christine Chubbuck struggles with depression and professional frustrations as she tries to advance her career.
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5 films that influenced Christine
What critics say influenced Christine
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.
“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).
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.
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