Movie Review: Christine (2016)

A biographical drama about coping with depression, Christine explores the build-up of suppressed anxiety to acute levels.

It's the early 1970s, and Christine Chubbuck (Rebecca Hall) is a field reporter with a Sarasota, Florida television station, approaching her 30th birthday. Professionally respected but socially awkward, she prepares and presents the Suncoast Digest segment, focusing on local politics and people. Station manager Michael Nelson (Tracy Letts) finds her material boring, and with the ratings sinking, prods Christine towards more sensational journalism. She resists and they clash constantly.

In her private life Christine is single, tense and depressed, although she does volunteer as a puppeteer at a children's hospital. She harbors a secret crush on station anchor George Ryan (Michael C. Hall), while still living with her mother Peg (J. Smith-Cameron), and suffering through bouts of severe abdominal pains. When the station owner Bob Anderson (John Cullum) announces opportunities for a promotion to a higher-profile Baltimore station, the competitive stress levels at work are heightened.

An independent production based on a true and shocking story, Christine delves into the reporter's life with a mixture of real and imagined events. Written and co-produced by Craig Shilowich and directed by Antonio Campos, the film explores the dichotomy of a woman respected for her principled professional standards, and indeed looked up to by colleagues, but personally and quietly suffering the devastating impacts of depression.

Campos invests plenty of screen time to tease out the attributes and dynamics of his lead character within her work environment. Yes there are petty professional jealousies and arguments about the trajectory of news-as-entertainment, but Christine is recognized as smart, ambitious, and confident, embracing feminism and willing to protect her integrity and fight against the rising tide of blood-and-gore ambulance-chasing news coverage.

Yet away from work the insecurities are gnawing away at her psyche. She is socially uneasy, difficult to approach, and cannot get any man to pay her any attention. Desperate for male companionship and eager to start a family, instead she is confronted with a grievous medical diagnosis. And conversations with her mother Peg include dark references to how badly everything ended at her previous job in Boston.

The film maintains a pragmatic matter-of-factness and focus on the one individual, Campos alternating the action between the local television station resplendent with garish 1970s-era decor (yellow and orange everywhere) and Christine's cramped apartment. He draws a stellar performance from Rebecca Hall, who carries the entire film. With a slightly bent but still assured public posture, she conveys the clash between internal insecurities and a dogged external determination to soldier on.

Life reaches a crossroads of apparent dead-ends, shattered personal and professional expectations, and an unacceptable imperative to conform. Despite all the seemingly insurmountable difficulties, the film nevertheless captures the sometimes difficult to discern but always present love and respect surrounding Christine, both at home and at work.

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Movie Review: The Lovers (2017)

A romantic drama and comedy, The Lovers is a playful but sparse exploration of unexpected surprises lurking in a stale marriage.

Mary (Debra Winger) and Michael (Tracy Letts) are well into middle age and going through the motions of pretending to be married. In reality they cannot tolerate each other, and they are both having affairs and barely bothering to keep them secret. Mary's lover is writer Robert (Aidan Gillen) while Michael's mistress is Lucy (Melora Walters), a dancer and ballet teacher.

Both Mary and Michael have separately promised their lovers they will end their marriage around the time their son Joel (Tyler Ross) and his girlfriend Erin (Jessica Sula) arrive for a weekend visit. But an inadvertent morning kiss sparks passion back into the mariage, scrambling Mary and Michael's emotions and confusing their lovers.

The irony of The Lovers resides in both affairs starting to emit the same stale stench of tired relationships. Robert and Lucy appear well on the way to introducing heavy doses of irritation into the lives of Mary and Michael respectively, in a dual example of the sheets feeling silkier in a new lover's bed, but only temporarily.

And so it's no surprise when writer and director Azael Jacobs reignites the fire between Mary and Michael, the married couple rediscovering the joy of physical intimacy with each other and forced to hide the affair-within-marriage from their illicit lovers.

The Lovers deftly manoeuvres through this mixed up terrain of the heart, but the scarcity of substance is also obvious. The film is just over 90 minutes long, but the pace is slow, the pauses pregnant, and several scenes retread familiar dynamics without adding much new material. The arrival of son Joel and his girlfriend Erin is a prelude to some unnecessary histrionics.

Jacobs also has difficulty rounding out his characters. For a small film centred on four people, Mary and Michael are offered relatively little depth, while Robert and Lucy are sketched in with just the broadest of strokes. The limitations of the writing are sometimes painfully evident in the wooden dialogue, and other than stars Debra Winger and Tracy Letts, the performances and delivery border on amateurishly stiff.

But The Lovers succeeds more often than it fails thanks to a clear-eyed perspective on raw emotional eccentricity. The heart magnet between Mary and Michael rotates to alternatively push them apart and pull them together, lovers and their lovers caught in a whirlpool of amusing uncertainty.

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Movie Review: Lady Bird (2017)

A coming-of-age drama-comedy, Lady Bird is a poignant and irresistible exploration of the awkward transformation into adulthood, with two tremendous central performances.

Sacramento, 2002. Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is in her final year of high school and struggling to define herself while navigating a tumultuous relationship with her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf), who is perpetually stressed about money. Christine insists that she be called Lady Bird, while at her Catholic school she carries the burden of coming from a poor family and has a limited number of friends, including Julie (Beanie Feldstein).

Determined to escape from Sacramento and seek a college education at a respectable east coast university, Christine has to face the reality that money is tight, her father Larry (Tracy Letts) is unemployed, and her grades are not quite good enough. She joins the drama club and finds her first boyfriend in Danny (Lucas Hedges). She also tries to fit in with a new set of friends, including rich girl Jenna (Odeya Rush) and cool band member Kyle (Timothée Chalamet), but growing up and striking out will not come easy.

Written and directed by Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird is a tender look at the mother-daughter relationship during the clumsy final steps on the journey from girl to woman. Gerwig infuses her film with plenty of humour while holding irony firmly in check, Lady Bird avoiding smart-alecky moments and just focusing on the small tears and joys that naturally flow through family life. The film is energetically edited by Nick Houy, some scenes lasting for just a few seconds, the pace conveying the blurry commotion of life's hectic high school chapter drawing to a close.

The film contains plenty of painfully real moments that dance between the playfulness and agony of a teenager exhibiting childlike behaviour in the service of budding adulthood. Christine is embarrassed by her family, her relative poverty and her city, and is beginning to find the tools of independence to help influence major life-altering decisions. At the same time, the final stages of high school carry less fear of disciplinary consequences, and Christine and her friends let loose. Previously hidden antics bubble to the surface, none more entertaining than Christine finding her voice during an anti-abortion lecture. She also participates in a prank involving the head nun as revenge for years of institutionalized paternalism.

But when Christine engineers the disappearance of a crucial math course grading book in a too-smart attempt to get into better colleges, the math teacher calls out her honour. The flash on Christine's face, brilliantly captured by Ronan, is the responsible adult starting to push aside the unaccountable child.

Away from the high jinx, Gerwig's story is about a mother who has sacrificed everything to make her family financially viable, and along the way forgot that expressed compassion and words of encouragement are more important than a tidy bedroom. The film's sustained emotional intelligence resides in Lady Bird being aware of  how much her mother loves her, despite the continuous barrage of incoming grief. Christine can sometimes handle the turmoil, but is also forced to invest plenty of time navigating around Marion's hardened emotions.

Gerwig needed two strong central performances to make the film work, and gets them from Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf. Ronan at 23 can still convincingly pull off 17, and plays Christine with the delicious slyness of a teenager beginning to believe she can outsmart the world of adults. Metcalf delivers a career defining role, conveying the harried life of a mother measuring life in dollars and cents, and yet somewhere deep in her heart still harbouring a deep if complicated love for her daughter.

Lady Bird glows with warm authenticity, the universal story of a fledgling adult seeking to fly away from a nest that will only start to look cozy from a distance.

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