A REAL-LIFE HORROR STORY
Rebecca Hall shines in chilling tale of reporter spiralling towards tragedy
Christine Chubbuck was a TV news reporter at a station in Sarasota, Fla., in 1974, when her life took a disastrous turn. If you’re unfamiliar with her story, you could easily look it up — or you could watch as British actor Rebecca Hall gets eerily into her skin and her head in a bravura performance.
Director Antonio Campos captures the look and feel of the Anchorman era perfectly, though without the satire. Clothes, hairstyles, gender politics, self-help theories (early transactional analysis) — all are expertly laid out on the screen with documentarian finesse. Christine wears her hair long and straight, and sings along to Annie’s Song by John Denver while driving her yellow Beetle.
Flinty, needy, brittle, lonely, serious to a fault and recognized by all as the smartest person in the newsroom, Christine is caught in a bind. Her stories on social justice issues — hospital zoning and the like — don’t impress her boss (Tracy Letts), who has just learned McLuhan’s maxim: If it bleeds, it leads. Neither is her career helped by her ornery attitude. But covering the local strawberry fair or egg fest is giving her stomach pains.
Christine sees a ray of hope when the station’s owner (John Cullum) announces he’s bought another station in Baltimore and wants to move some of the talent there. Even more promising, blow-dried anchor (Michael C. Hall) seems to have taken a romantic interest in her. But that proves to be a misunderstanding; meanwhile, she gets bad news from the doctor, still lives with her mom, and is about to hit 30.
Hall’s great achievement is to make Christine likable. She may lash out at her co-workers, or express frustration with them, but she’s also clearly had a rough ride through life thus far.
Meanwhile, she buys a police scanner to keep abreast of Sarasota’s admittedly mild crime scene, and scrambles to put together fresh takes on “real” news stories.
But nothing clicks. And so she spirals into a volatile combination of depression and anger.
Even 40 years on, the events of July 1974 will send a chill through your bones at the conclusion to this story.