Kate Plays Christine

The new movie by Robert Greene is a tour de force in the blending and bending of genres.

There's a tangible sensitivity to Kate Plays Christine that is constantly present as the project explores two personas and a gamut of topics (gender politics, gun control, and depression among them).

The process of transformation is the story, and the story truly belongs to the artist.

I would simultaneously argue that Sheil and Greene go off the rails several times during Kate Plays Christine, most notably in their overly artful and self-conscious attempt to re-enact the shooting but also that they get viewers closer to the real Christine Chubbuck than I would have thought possible.

There’s an emotional dimension to Kate Plays Christine—an empathy linking an actor to the human headline she’s dressing up as—that’s nearly abstracted into oblivion by the film’s neurotic self-examination.

Much of Kate Plays Christine is more of a form exercise than it is a documentary portrait, which works to both the film’s benefit and detriment.

Kate Plays Christine is a documentary, but often a totally fake one, cheekily defining itself as its own making-of DVD supplement and documenting its own evaporation into near-nothingness. Every scene cries — or whines — about the entire project's inherent impossibility.