Happy Thursday! Hope you had a beautiful start to the fall season. I’ve spent the last few weeks in a festival frenzy at the Toronto International Film Festival and now the New York Film Festival. Look forward to that coverage in the coming weeks! Today, I’m reviewing Lance Oppenheim’s media satire Primetime, which follows Robert Pattinson as To Catch A Predator’s Chris Hansen as he chases ratings success (and you know, predators, I guess).
It’s a deliciously devilish watch in theaters this weekend. Plus, a few streaming recommendations through. Love, Karl.
Primetime is a work of cinematic excess. It is a spectacle.
There are montages on montages. Clips of television shows and articles are cut to liberally and seamlessly. Images overlay, smash cut, slice, and fade into each other chaotically. However, this is a rare case where the style begets the substance. It’s that clear-eyed point-of-view that makes Primetime such a devilishly delectable watch that you voraciously consume, and then feel dirty after. That’s exactly what writer-director Lance Oppenheim wants you to feel.
While Primetime is his first narrative feature, you can see the influences of his documenty roots throughout the movie, which is based heavily on the article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die” that was originally published in 2007 shortly after an incident left a man dead as a direct result of Chris Hansen’s pursuit of greatness… I mean, predators, of course. The movie zeros in on a short period of the show’s production where the pursuit of greatness, a predator he calls his “white whale”, goes too far.
There’s a griminess to the way that Robert Pattinson portrays Hansen, who, if you either were too young (rude) or lived under a rock, was known for hosting the show “To Catch A Predator”, a reality show where he’d lure unsuspecting men chatting with minors to a house wired with cameras to expose their misdeeds. He tells young actor Dan Plumb (played by an astonishing Skyler Gisondo giving one of the great supporting performances of the year), a decoy for the predators with his young looks (he’s actually 23), that what they’re doing isn’t acting, it’s heroism. “Your role is superhero”, he tells Dan in a speech to assuage any guilt he may feel over the show—and, of course, to reduce any liabilities. However, Hansen never stops acting. He’s acting as judge and jury for the cameras, as messiah for his crew, as a good husband for his wife (Anna Faris in a far too small role). But when the facade drops, his intentions are clear: he wants the world.
And “the world” being primetime. After a meeting with the NBC head of programming Jeff Zucker (playing himself in a hilarious industry insider bit), Chris gets his chance. Zucker wants them to take on Lost (the movie hilariously cuts to the plane crash and polar bears) with the most salacious run of episodes of the show yet. The show’s soft-spoken but no-nonsense, cutthroat producer Andie Bender (a deliciously corrupt Merritt Weaver), whose pursuit of ratings and success rivals Hansen’s, is elated by their promotion. But, as with anything in entertainment, the good of an opportunity is only as good as the opportunities for your career.
Primetime will likely draw comparisons to Nightcrawler.
They’re both about the parasitism of television. Human suffering and villainy as entertainment. Though both Hansen and Lou Bloom would likely tell you they’re patrons of truth and goodness. But where Nightcrawler (streaming on Netflix) was a dark character study, Primetime is largely a satire of the entertainment industry and how its promises of fame can drive you to lose yourself. It has more in common with Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (buy or rent on Prime). In the case of Dan, whose dream is to finally get his Screen Actors Guild card, that is quite literally what happens. As he practices his high-pitched tween voice and shaves his chest to look even younger for the show’s targets, you can’t decide whether to laugh or cringe. Gisondo, quickly becoming the venerable “that guy” of his generation, gives a nuanced, layered performance that you can’t help but root for.
In a Florida decoy house, we experience through Dan’s eyes the organized chaos of the production. Grips and producers zip around the house setting up shots and cameras. His only grounding is fellow decoy Del Harvey (musician Phoebe Bridgers in a promising film debut) who gives him the context behind their target before Andie throws him to the wolves. Alone in the kitchen, Dan switches to his young voice as the predator walks in, “you’re even hotter than your photos.” Dan falls into the roll before turning around and seeing the man has taken his penis out, spraying it with whipped cream. Dan is visibly horrified. Chris and Andie couldn’t be happier.
It’s the juxtaposition between entertainment and real human depravity that makes Primetime such a fascinating watch.
Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), the founder of Perverted Justice, trawls online chatrooms for potential targets like he’s hunting. Except it’s like he’s hunting for sport, rather than any real reason. It’s almost like he’s getting off on tricking their prey. Isn’t that ironic. Maher is another standout, oozing sleaziness as he doles out his own brand of… well, perverted justice. It’s moments like these that push the movie away from a psychological character study, like Nightcrawler, and more into dark comedy satire. For both better and worse.
Pattinson, who has made a career of great underrated performance, gives his greatest to-date. It’s the kind of mesmerizing, menacing, and Machiavellian performance that wins overlooked actors their Oscars. However, there’s an opaqueness to his character that is both fascinating and frustrating. His motivations are clear, but the origin of those remain clouded, like he only exists in the context of the movie. Andie and Dan, on the other hand, feel more fully-fleshed out. They exist in a larger world, even if they’re desperate to make the one they’re in their reality. And perhaps that’s by design. Hansen believes in the world he’s created so that the reality fades away into static.
