Kate Plays Christine

It was a strange coincidence this past Sundance when two movies about the same subject - Christine Chubbuck - played in competition. Christine, the other movie, is a conventional biopic, one that I found to be the best movie I've seen so far this year; this take on Christine Chubbuck is a documentary approach. Kind of.

Kate Plays Christine centers around Kate Lynn Sheil preparing for the role of Christine Chubbuck in a low-budget biopic. We follow her through the preparation period, which consists of research, getting a tan, getting fitted for a wig, calling Chubbuck's former news station in order to gain access to archive footage of Christine, and interviews with locals from Sarasota Florida about Christine. This all is interspersed with footage from this biopic in-the-making.

This is where the film's premise is going to confuse an average viewer, this biopic that's being filmed isn't actually "real". There is no movie actually being made within this 'documentary' to be seen, though what little is seen, looks terrible.

Kate Lynn Sheil also, I was surprised, by how bad her performance is in these scenes. Yet, as I continued to watch the movie, I began to realize, that was the point.

In Christine, we see Rebecca Hall's take on Chubbuck as someone who wants to be a reporter in a bigger market, but her actual aptitude for being a reporter, as portrayed by Hall, leaves you wondering why she chose this particular field in the first place. A co-worker of Christine's even says, before presenting rare footage of the actual Christine Chubbuck giving an interview says, 'she wasn't the greatest interviewer'. Which leads me to believe that Kate Lyn Sheil is playing this part badly on purpose to imitate Christine Chubbuck's failure to be a reporter the way that she wanted to be. The "movie" within the documentary is bad as a statement that a biopic about someone truly unknowable, like Christine Chubbuck, shouldn't be made.

Though the execution of this concept isn't perfect, it has enough to admire within it to give it a watch. Though I disagree with the statement that's most likely being made about Christine, and even to some extent, itself, I respect why the filmmakers would take that stance.

Robert Greene and Kate Lyn Sheil are the reasons this movie works, with a lesser director and actress, this could've easily been a complete disaster, but somehow, this tricky material finds its way.

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.

I walked out of this film after 15 mins, so you should probably take that into consideration when reading.

Kate Plays Christine is a kind of mockumentary that revolves around an actress (Kate Lyn Sheil) preparing for a role in a film that doesn't actually exist (or maybe the role she's preparing for is one where she plays an actor preparing for a role, initiating a loop of pretentiousness the filmmakers seem content to create for themselves).

Kate Lyn Sheil seems to lack character and experience, which would make her a very poor choice for a role where the character publicly kills herself after a tragically short life of anxiety and failure. The filmmakers try to make up for this by focusing on her physical transformation into the character, and presenting some first-hand sources on Christine's life and personality in an extremely shallow way that never attempts to really peel back the layers on who Christine was. The film instead revolves around a pretty, bland girl making herself look good for the camera.

The idea for this mockumentary is solid if needlessly abstract, however the fact that it's welded to a real-life tragedy that doesn't get the attention it deserves downright turns my stomach. If Christine could see how her life story had been co-opted by these thoughtless artists in the pursuit of their own egos I think that she'd feel the same.

I want to be diplomatic and not call this garbage but…Ellie Kemper's less talented hipster cousin embarks on preparation of a role for a film that does not seem to exist (there is no record of it on IMDb and the news stories about the doc do not mention where it went. Did Greene set out to make the movie and then realize how awful all of his actors were and then change direction to salvage the footage by turning it into this "documentary"?) She looks nothing like the real Christine and any amount of spray tan and colored contacts aren't convincing enough to make us believe it. (The wig is the worst "performer" in this doc...as I'm typing this there's a scene where she TAKES IT SWIMMING. Girl, you want to be a real actress, don't be that much of a dumbass.) I'm confused why this got so much praise, I found it to be a frustrating watch.

It seems strange that two films in 2016 were made about a long forgotten on-air suicide in Saratoga, Florida in 1974. It's a bizarre enough event that I was interested in seeing the films. There is a straight-up biopic starring Recca Hall called Christine, but the more interesting film was probably the documentary, Kate Plays Christine (2016). In this documentary by Robert Greene-the audience follows actress Kate Lyn Sheil research and work out how to play the elusive Christine Chubbuck of which there is little existing footage or facts remaining-let alone the infamous tape of the incident. We learn about guns laws of the 70s, the behind-the-scene life at a small local news station, and the private agony that Chubbuck was experiencing at the time of her suicide. Sometimes the pretentious musings of the actress were trying, but in general it was an interesting way to get into the head of this damaged woman who deiced to share her misery with the world.