In His ‘Prime’
Robert Pattinson taps his inner Nicolas Cage for his latest, glorious gonzo performance.
Primetime
Director: Lance Oppenheim • Writer: Ajon Singh, based on the book by Luke Dittrich
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Merrit Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Matthew Maher
USA • 1hr 49mins
Opens Hong Kong October 8 • IIB
Grade: B+
Noted Weird Shit doc filmmaker Lance Oppenheim – his Some Kind of Heaven is about the world’s largest retirement community in Florida, and Spermworld investigates unregulated sperm donation – is actually generating more buzz right now because of his forthcoming… something with fellow Weird Shit director Nathan Fielder, You Can See Everything, an almost undefinable portrait of Theranos tech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes (anything men can do!). First out of the gate though is Oppenheim’s feature debut, Primetime, a biopic of sorts about short life and rapid flameout of network TV vigilante experiment To Catch a Predator.
For the uninitiated (you’re so lucky), To Catch a Predator was one of those uniquely American network television Hail Marys, a “throw it at the wall and see if it sticks” approach to programming, that earned it one season starting in 2004, back when terrestrial TV ratings and viewership were crucial. It was also the time when TV was embracing all things salacious and sensational, and what’s more salacious than catching dirty old men propositioning children for sex, live in prime time? The show’s host, Chris Hansen, as played by the ever-chameleonic Robert Pattinson, is a rabid true believer in righteousness and his crusade to protect children from diddlers (fine), in his own mythology (unsurprising) – but less so in legal due process and the total non-vagaries of entrapment (uh oh). All interrogated in gorgeous 4:3 Betacam glory.
Seems a little pervy…
The last time a film was so spiky in its media ethics dissection was Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler back in 2014. Primetime chronicles the few months between the show’s rapid rise to broadcast success and startling crash with a formal creativity that puts the viewers back in the time just before the digital era. The pictures in Primetime are free of the crystalline clarity of HDTV and 4K resolution, making its visuals as messy and muddled as its central characters’ morality. Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh, who based the film on Luke Dittrich’s Esquire feature, “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” dispense with backstory to drop us into Hansen’s mind from jump.
We meet Hansen as he’s creepily practising hid on-camera schtick, how to read sleazy messages back to his target (Tony Revolori) so as to destroy the man on TCaP, already a hit with middle Americans who love to see sexual predators carted off to jail (unless they’re in the White House or Cornell students. Allegedly). Hansen’s gig with NBC news hasn’t earned him a ton of respect – Dateline host Stone Phillips drops snide comments about how he’ll watch Hansen’s “little show from Afghanistan,” – but when the show gets bumped to a slot in prime time (8 to 11pm for the youngsters) against Lost he’s suddently a big deal. For the children! Under the shepherding of ruthless, ratings-first producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever, The Walking Dead, Severance), and with gleeful public shaming website Perverted Justice founder Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher, The Bride, Our Flag Means Death) and the conscience the show needs but never heeds, “Decoy Dan” Plum (Skyler Gisondo, the stickman version of Jimmy Olsen in James Gunn’s Superman), a preternaturally youthful struggling actor who Hansen woos to his cause. TCaP becomes a post-Friends Must-See TV hit.
But Oppenheim is only tangentially interested in the machinations of television programming. What propels Primetime are the forces that intersect to create the conditions for the success of something like TCaP and someone like Hansen (he’s still working); the unholy cocktail of wonky ethics, delusion, self-mythologising and media manipulation in the quest for eyeballs. Oppenheim’s regular DOP David Bolen’s feverish, ultra-saturated, expressionist images heighten the surreality of it all, and let the character deconstruction – so many mirrors – so fundamental to Primetime’s mesmerising “WTF?” storytelling come into sharp relief. It all goes to hell when the crew rolls into a Texas town where police chief Cortland Gunn (Bokeem Woodbine, perfect in two scenes) wants Hansen’s vote-friendly spotlight as he goes after the county’s assistant district attorney, Bill Conradt (Alex Winter, yeah, Bill from Bill & Ted), the white whale Hansen needs for sweeps (I’ll explain that some other time).
Everyone shows us who they are and why this toxic cocktail is so irresistible to them. Wever is scorching as the DGAF producer who keeps the cameras rolling no matter the cost and who will not have her work undervalued, and without her there is no broader context for Hansen’s motivations; Stone Phillips being a bitch isn’t enough. But this is Pattinson’s movie. Once again, the former sparkly vampire turns in a deliciously multi-layered performance that ping-pongs back and forth from shady and manipulative, to oddly sincere and pathetically desperate as his empire starts to fall apart. Pattinson interprets Hansen’s ambition as a form of madness, the latest in a string of films (a dystopian thief in The Rover, a petty hood in the Safdies’ Good Time, scene-stealing as the Dauphin in The King, a space prisoner in High Life, a space clone in Mickey 17, a fishfucker in The Lighthouse, fucking Batman) he’s made better just for his choices. The real Hansen told Entertainment Weekly the film is “so detached from reality… I’m not sure what the point of it was.” Guess he’s not into expressionism.