Christine Chubbuck, a small town Newscaster and local TV personality, is the subject of this doc, in which an actress tries to inhabit the persona of Christine during the last few days of her life, but never quite manages the task. Obviously this role would probably have been amazing in the hands of someone as talented as, say, Meryl Streep or Glenn Close, but the poor unknown actress who up to this point has had only minor roles, who is trying to play Christine, is WAY out of her league.
The attempt here is to make the actress, Kate Lyn Sheil, a stand-in for Christine, by changing her makeup, adding a wig and colored contact lenses, having her re-live Christine's last days in her Sarasota FL location, but unfortunately Kate is just not strong enough to manage the difficulty of channeling Christine, a complex, driven, obviously manic depressive woman, who's message to humanity is completely misinterpreted.
As almost everyone in the film mentions, the suicide was the inspiration for the brilliant screenplay of "Network" and is quoted many times throughout this doc. Of course, the storyline was changed significantly and the suicide was turned into an assassination, and the character that would have been a seriously manic young woman was turned into the unstable old man played by Peter Finch, so there is no real comparison between the two films.
Additionally, the doc also suffers from a lack of insight into its lead character. Although the promo leads one to believe that there will be some insight into the mindset of Christine and the incident that the doc is based on, the on-air suicide, there is none present, except for a short interview with a local psychologist.
As for Christine herself, we barely see her: All we get to see is a very short glimpse of the real Christine, for about 30 secs or less, during a very routine interview at what looks like a small-town public access TV station, and her voice is almost completely drowned out by the actress and the other former TV crew talking about her, instead of just letting the audience watch her conducting a meaningless interview -- the one time we get a tiny glimpse of Christine's soul, she is completely ignored. How ironic! Even in a doc about her, the filmmaker's egos trumped their own subject.
Christine read a carefully worded statement but it seems as though none of the film's Producers or Director spent much time dissecting it, rather putting their effort into a misguided re-enactment which falls flat and is ultimately defeated by the film crew at the end cleaning up the actress and doing away with the mess. It is all washed away, just as Christine's statement was but an ignorant mass media.
Kate, the actress, to her credit, makes a valiant attempt to give Christine a voice, gets to the edge and looks over, but never makes the leap. Even as the crew sets up the false studio and recreates the fatal newscast, Kate hesitates a few times before steeling herself for the final scene. But it's never satisfying -- it has an anti-climatic feel about it all. it comes off as being stagey, unrealistic and has a very low-budget feel about it.
Although the film makes a great effort to interview everyone that Christine had contact with, there seems to be a lot of key people missing -- there are some side references to a pair of brothers who are never really addressed, and one wonders what happened to both of them? Did they also commit suicide? Or were they just never contacted? The film seems to create more questions than it answers.
The actual tape of Christine's suicide, showing her putting a gun to her head and pulling the trigger, has never been shown after the day of the incident, and even though it is referred to by the other men of the TV crew, no explanation is given as to the present whereabouts of the tape, other than that it is not available.
Apparently a tape of the actual event has now been located, and after all the efforts to get it released, it still remains to be seen whether the widow of the station owner will allow anyone to broadcast it ever again. Perhaps the tape may hold some hidden inner message that Christine wanted to impart to the world, but for whatever reason, the world wants to forget.
