Recensioni de* critic*

True to Christine's dedication to serious news, the film eschews sensationalism in favor of helping us get under the skin of a troubled woman through the accumulation of detail in a way that doesn't condescend to her or turn her into a caricature. The immersive performance of Rebecca Hall, whose Christine is physically gawky and emotionally guileless, withdrawn, and argumentative all at once, is, of course, key to the success of the film.

Hall's brilliantly detailed performance reveals a woman being torn apart by repression and disappointment, as if her intestines had been replaced by barbed wire. Instead of trying to answer many of the intangible questions Shiel grapples with in Kate Plays Christine, Hall only deepens their ambiguity by denying the chance for a therapeutic confession.

What seems clear, at every step, is that Campos' sympathies are entirely with his subject, even when those sympathies feel at odds with the fastidious attention to detail with which he has re-created Chubbuck, her milieu and her moment. There is something of a mortician's perfectionism in the way the director attends to his movie's surface, from the period-perfect cars and fashions to the drab, downbeat colors of Joe Anderson's cinematography.

With an actor of Hall's power, Campos could and should have left viewers shuddering with the shattering force of the conflicts that were wrenching Christine from life. Instead, her precisely calculated and overly specific performance leaves a sense of manipulated pity and a shrug of confirmation. The scenes in Campos's film add up (and do nothing but add up), and the performance that he gets from Hall puts the numbers in their places.

The film isn't exploitative. Hall's all-in performance projects Chubbuck's weaknesses as well as her strengths without any editorial underlining. With steely ambition and rampaging insecurity, Hall's Christine combines professionalism, intelligence, and even artistic intuition... Campos and Shilowich whip up narrative momentum without relying on our rooting interest for Christine, who is alternately sympathetic and excruciating. The movie compresses events to achieve pressure-cooker intensity.

It ends on a tepid note. Since we know, going in, where the story is headed, there's a feeling of rubbernecking at a tragedy as the events mass up against her. What are we supposed to take from the film? What is it trying to say? If she hadn't committed suicide on live television, would anyone have cared? Are these even the right questions to ask? Hall's performance is so authoritative, however, that it justifies the film's existence. She's something to see.

Hall is an actor of remarkable, subtle gifts, disinclined to give splashy, "Look at me!" performances, and Christine continues to follow that thread. It's also the finest work she's done yet. It's tempting for a performer who's playing an alienated, isolated person to just put up a wall of inscrutability. But Hall's Christine draws us closer rather than pushing us away—this performance is a quiet, multidimensional marvel.

It's no masterpiece, but by and large it does justice to its subject, who falls victim to a toxic cocktail of major depression, social maladjustment, and the indignities of the emergent infotainment business. For all those interrelated themes, though, the film rarely feels overextended—it possesses the poise of the best on-air talent.

Solidly directed by Antonio Campos, from a screenplay by Craig Shilowich, it tells the sad tale of a depressed woman whose work environment only serves to stoke her despair. Rebecca Hall is excellent in the title role, and Michael C. Hall and Tracy Letts are equally good as her casually insensitive co-workers. Morbidly curious voyeurs may be disappointed that Christine doesn't deliver the "money shot," à la Scanners. Nor, however, does it replicate the casual indifference of cable news.

With Afterschool, Campos plugged into the isolation and madness of a Columbine-like killer, but while Chubbuck is a threat only to herself, the film has the same commitment to defining the suffocating limits of her world — physical, professional, and psychological. Campos respects the integrity of her point of view while understanding how the broader culture might reject it.

We'll almost certainly never see the tape of Chubbuck's death, but its absence has its own power, and even though Christine reconstructs her life, it leaves us aching at the void she left behind.

Tackling this life with honesty and respect demands a tricky balancing act between context and character, which first-time screenwriter Craig Shilowich performs remarkably well. Christine explores the numerous ways that the era's open sexism contributes to Chubbuck's professional frustration, and does so without pretending that her own eccentricities weren't also a factor... Rather than make a futile attempt to explain why Chubbuck did what she did, Christine embraces the irresolvable.