Sundance Report: Inside Rebecca Hall's Tragic Performance as a Suicidal Reporter in 'Christine'

Rebecca Hall in ‘Christine’ (Sundance Film Festival)

Rebecca Hall so thoroughly inhabits the role of late Florida newscaster Christine Chubbuck in the movie Christine that, when she spoke with Yahoo Movies about the Sundance Film Festival drama on Sunday, the sound of her natural British accent qualified as a genuine shock.

Hall delivers a bold, transformed performance in director Antonio Campos’ intense and ultimately tragic third feature, offering up a sympathetic portrait of a very enigmatic (and unknowable) figure. In a strangely forgotten chapter in American media history, Chubbuck, a 29-year-old reporter working for a small TV station in Florida in 1974, committed suicide on camera. Campos’ film (strangely, one of two about Chubbuck at this year’s film festival), acts as a character study of the tragic newscaster, focusing on the weeks leading up to her fatal decision.

It’s a film filled with quiet dread, rich detail and few real answers, which is appropriate for such an unnecessary and distant disaster; Chubbuck’s suicide is almost an urban legend, heretofore told mostly through listicles on shady, exploitative websites. And because there was hardly any video of Chubbuck on screen and relatively little literature about the woman off of it, the film required Hall, an attentive actress who has excelled in films such as Vicky Cristina Barcelona and may have finally found her true breakout role, to create a character from mostly imagination and empathy.

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“I had 20 minutes of her presenting [her TV show] Sun Coast Digest; it was someone performing their job as a presenter, clearly in a low mood, very lethargic and monotonous,” Hall explained the day after the film’s Saturday premiere. “From there, it was a constant act of reading the script and thinking about what she’s going through, and imagining: What does someone who is desperately trying to perform being a normal human, and someone who is in pain and is trying to pretend to the world that she isn’t [act like]?”

As alluded to throughout the film, especially in conversations with her more free-spirited mother (J. Smith-Cameron), Christine suffered some sort of breakdown several years before while working as a reporter in Boston. We never find out the extent of the trouble, except that it led her to return home to Sarasota. The small Florida city isn’t much of a news market, and the ratings at the station she works at are in the toilet. It’s a discouraging scenario even before the “If it bleeds, it leads” directive for more sensationalism that comes from the station general manager (Tracy Letts).

A virgin who has had very little luck with men in her life, Christine develops a crush on the charming (though aggressively mediocre) anchor George (Michael C. Hall). She has friends at the station, including the sympathetic camerawoman Jean (Maria Dizzia), but Christine doesn’t make it easy to be around her. She’s intense and incredibly ambitious, and her desire to report impactful community news rubs up against the new station mantra. She’s also a less-than-compelling on-air presence, at least during the depths of her depression: Her voice is robotic, her mannerisms stilted; it looks as if she’s reading the grimmest of news updates, even when she’s giving a report on local chicken farmers.

All told, Christine has a fair amount to be upset about, but in piecing together the character, Hall decided that those circumstantial hardships could not possibly be responsible for the drastic action that Chubbuck ultimately takes.

“I don’t think it was a question of, which of these things made her depressed,” Hall said. “All of these things would have made anyone depressed, but they would have gotten over it. She didn’t have the chemical equipment to get over it. I don’t know what the real Christine Chubbuck was diagnosed with. Probably some depression and there was some medication sometimes, but there was very little information. But I read the script and made the executive decision to diagnose her, with the knowledge of modern psychiatry, as a borderline personality.”

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Neither Hall nor Campos (or screenwriter Craig Shilowich before them) could really understand what was wrong with the Christine, and there was little help available from the few people who knew her. “Her mom passed away, her father is very, very old, and there’s a brother in Las Vegas we didn’t speak to,” Campos said. “ We were focused on creating a character based on what we knew about her, but the film is a work of fiction that is based on true events.”

Ultimately, Christine creates an upsetting, but compelling portrait of a woman born into the wrong era in history: It’s too late for the sort of journalism she wants to do, but too early in the medical field’s understanding and treatment of mental illness. The video of her suicide has been locked away forever, but the shock of that moment is far less profound than the downward spiral reimagined here. From all the evidence on screen, Chubbuck was a difficult person to know in real life, always driving away the people who wanted to help her. But Hall’s performance is so good that even with her off-putting behavior, it’s impossible to not feel pangs of sadness for a nearly anonymous newscaster who died nearly a half-century ago. If only she had received that kind of understanding back in 1974.