Hall's Christine is a tough person to like, but as the film creeps towards its inevitable climax, the feeling is one of empathetic dread instead of anticipatory comeuppance. The merging of director, writer, and actor in Christine makes her a hugely successful anti-hero, someone who lashes out because of recognizable personal weakness. She gets so close to breakthroughs, such that one can see the possibility of change working its way across her forehead before she backs off and shuts down a better future. To accept a solution on someone else's terms or inspiration would be a kind of vulnerability, and as demonstrated by a telling scene in which she's singing peacefully in her car, only to abruptly stop when someone pulls alongside her, vulnerability isn't a playable card in her deck. It's so often male characters that project an impenetrable exterior onto the world, and where those films often frame that approach as admirable, it's framed as pointless in Christine, a blinkered approach that kept out anyone who wanted to help and only served to make the protagonist's life smaller.
Convincingly set in the 70's, Campos orients the viewer in this time period with more than costumes and hairstyling. Everyone's getting a little more acquainted with psychology and therapy, and they somewhat recognize their own coping strategies for the stress of the job. Simons' weatherman gets drunk. Hall's anchor is a recovering coke addict and a regular feature at the local support group. Dizzia's camerawoman sings and eats ice cream. All of this language around habits and activities that relieve stress evades Christine, who translates her frustrations into a deeper focus and internalization towards work that is not what her boss wants. It's not that she should take up Simons' habit of drinking, but that she has to release the pressure valve. She gets in an endless cycle where the off-ramps are slowly reduced to the one she ultimately takes. She's unable to recognize that people around her have problems like hers, and would be happy to commiserate, but there's that vulnerability problem again.
Suicide has a hundred fathers, and who knows why the real Christine did what she did. Campos and Hall craft a tight case that might bear no resemblance to actual events, but in their rich portrayal, they do make her far more than a mere historical footnote, an accomplishment equal to, if not greater than, faithful accuracy. B+