"You see how this looks, right?"
Is it possible to hunt monsters without becoming one yourself? That seems to be the question being wrestled with at the heart of the film Primetime, covering the inception and first two years of NBC's Dateline spin-off, To Catch a Predator with Chris Hansen. I think the filmmakers have a definite answer to that question, but whether or not that makes for an engaging film is another issue entirely.
It's 2005 and Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) is riding high on the success of his new show To Catch a Predator. He and his producer Andie Bender (Merritt Weaver) get a directive from NBC President Jeff Zucker, playing himself, to make the show more sensational so it can compete against ABC's hit show Lost in the 9pm primetime slot on Wednesdays.
The show's behind the scenes crew, the folks actually doing the work of luring child predators to the sting operation, include an overzealous tech guy named Xavier (Matthew Maher) and the show's regular decoy Del (Phoebe Bridgers). In need of new decoys (a recent one quit after one of the predators looked just like his father), they bring on Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), an over-eager young actor hoping this will be a way to get his Screen Actor's Guild card.
The material itself, from first time screenwriter Ajon Singh, barely rises above sensationalized movie of the week-ripped from the headlines type stuff that used to be all over television in the 70s and 80s. Oppenheim's direction and the three lead performances, however, help it rise above its rather scandalous ambitions into something more provocative.
Despite what you may have heard from the man himself, the film is not a hit piece on Hansen, though the scene where he wakes his young sons up to watch the debut episode of his show—along with all interactions with his wife (Anna Faris)—do make him almost entirely unsympathetic. Pattinson manages to thread the needle of making Hansen understandable if not sympathetic. This is a driven man with no room in his life for anything outside of achieving and projecting success.
Going through the actual tedious work of bringing child predators out of the shadows and into the light has got to be one of the most soul-draining experiences a person could endure, no matter how noble their intentions may have been. When you get down into the mud with these people, it takes a long time to wash off all that muck. Dan and Chris would seem to represent the two sides of the coin, coming out of this experience with very different viewpoints.
However, the film invented the character of producer Andie Bender wholesale, and ended up giving her the slightly more recognizable character arc, keeping Hansen at an even further remove. There aren't two sides to this coin, it's not even a coin, it's a seemingly infinite-sided die with a million different outcomes. Andie's struggle with a job offer to jump ship and produce What Would You Do? with John Quiñones is more clearly drawn and ends much more predictably than the now almost completely unstable Hansen's arc ends.
Then there's poor Dan Plum, thrown into a job no one properly prepared him for and struggling to maintain his composure when the (now fully adult) kid from Jerry Maguire comes into his house and whips out his dick. And yes, audience, Jonathan Lipnicki is all grown-up and has a hammer. Skyler Gisondo is among my favorite working actors because he demonstrates so much range within a very specific archetype. Perfectly cast as Superman's best bud Jimmy Olsen in last year's Superman, Gisondo has popped up playing completely unique variants of these characters in everything from Licorice Pizza to The Righteous Gemstones, and he is a delight to see pop up again and again.
Here he breaks your heart as the well-intentioned but clearly in way over his head Decoy Dan, doing his best to treat this as a hundred different acting exercises, rather than confronting the reality of what he's doing (until a crucial and outstanding scene at the end of the film's second act). He perfectly executes the proper levels of empathy and cringe while performing "Seasons of Love" from Rent at two different points in the film, making himself truly vulnerable both times in completely different ways.
Pattinson is having himself a hell of a year (and it ain't over yet). In this film, Pattinson manages to thread a needle Joseph Gordon-Levitt never threaded in his multiple mid-2010s biopics. He sounds just like Hansen but looks nothing like him, and you somehow buy it anyway. Pattinson's got Hansen's cadence and his bizarre newsman-to-his-core drawing out of words for dramatic effect thing down pat, and you just go with his interpretation of this character.
I think Pattinson's real superpower as an actor is the fact that he's never seemed to care if you like his characters (lord knows he's played his fair share of scumbums). He plays them completely honestly, but he's never been concerned with likability or relatability. It makes him the perfect fit for a role like Chris Hansen.
As I alluded to earlier, Merritt Weaver's producer character was invented but along with Gisondo, she does get a much more grounded arc. Weaver has always been terrific in everything she's ever been in, even the rotten Welcome to Marwen, and the humanity Weaver brings to the character makes it easy to emotionally invest in Andie over the impenetrable Hansen. She is the crucial third point to this film's moral triangle, and by far the most adaptable of the three, and the most comfortable interacting with both the light and the dark.
Oppenheim's weirdly voyeuristic film has a look all its own and credit to him and cinematographer David Bolen for imbuing the film with the look and feel of a documentary, television show, and narrative film all in one. Nearly all of the sly commentary on the media and its relationship with law enforcement is done through Bolen's camera work and Daniel Garber's editing, creating a stark contrast with the much more obvious commentary in the dialogue. There's an obviousness to just saying, "the film is actually watching people watch people," but it's constructing a spectacle around constructing a spectacle.
Primetime is a fascinating film about ambition, the dawn of sensationalized "news" programs, and the collateral damage left in the wake of a determined man with a righteous agenda and a fleet of cameras at his command. The pursuit of righteousness has made monsters of many men, and this film seems to think that Hansen is a man lost, one only seeing the world as black or white, right or wrong, light or dark, while bathing in shades of grey. And the cameras trained on him certainly don't help us see things any clearer.
Header image via IMDb