“You see how this looks, right?”
The new thriller Primetime is a queasy portrait of a deviant sociopath who in the view of director Lance Oppenheim represents a clear and present danger to the public. That sociopath is Chris Hansen.
Hansen is a former Dateline NBC personality best known for his 2004-07 series To Catch a Predator, a candid-camera show wherein he would confront would-be pedophiles lured into his trap by the promise of sex with a minor. These “decoys” were adult actors posing as underage victims-in-waiting. The sting operations that put them in a room with the (probable) perps? A collab between Hansen’s camp and a vigilante group called Perverted-Justice that hunted grownups seeking encounters with minors via chat rooms and early social media.
I never watched To Catch a Predator, for the same reason I would decline to attend a public hanging, even if I knew the condemned person to be guilty of vile crimes beyond any shadow of doubt. But it was a hit from the jump, despite-or-because the pileup of legal and ethical problems it invited. This reality show’s most visible and dramatic consequence was the stuff of reality-show producer dreams: In November 2006, an assistant district attorney in the Dallas-Fort Worth area fatally shot himself inside his home after Hansen, his producer, and camera crew, and a SWAT team surrounded the place. This public official had accepted an invitation to meet up with a decoy he believed to be a 13-year-old boy.
The lurid, unsettling film Oppenheim has made dramatizing all of this isn’t a biopic, though Robert Pattinson’s flashy performance as Hansen is the basis of its promotional campaign. As demonstrated by the clipped, nasal line readings he gives of the catch phrases Hansen drops on his prey—“You see how this looks, right?” “Why don’t you have a seat right there?”—Pattinson is not attempting naturalistic mimicry of Hansen (who has condemned the movie, unsurprisingly), or of any human creature. The English star is giving us an Oily American even more obviously craven than the one he played in The Odyssey, wherein he and Tom Holland both affected American accents to play Bronze Age Greeks because that’s the mode of the film.
I may be suffering from a mild case of Pattinson overexposure—he also starred in The Drama last spring, and he has Dune Part Three coming before the year is out—but I was far more affected by Skyler Gisondo’s more vulnerable and dimensional performance as Dan, an aspiring screen actor who becomes one of the show’s decoys because he looks like a teenager and is reasonably good at improv. (The movie opens with Dan’s audition tape, where he mentions he doesn’t have an agent yet before singing a little bit of “Seasons of Love” from Rent.) Gisondo is 30; he’s playing a 23-year-old pretending to be 13. His very funny performance as the ladykillin’ Boy Photographer Jimmy Olsen was a major value-add to last summer’s Superman, but Primetime is evidence of more varied gifts. Dan’s more experienced and androgynous fellow decoy Del is played by singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, who’s good but far from the film’s most adventurous bit of casting. You’re better off not knowing who all show up as some of the would-be predators.
Merritt Wever is terrific, too, as Andie Bender, Hansen’s top producer. She’s a classic enabler, a person who shares Hansen’s ambition and amorality, but not his vanity, and a person who can appear reasonable because she rarely raises her voice. (Washington has always had many such specimens, but never more than in recent years.)
Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh have adapted their movie from the 2007 Esquire feature “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” by Luke Dittrich. Dramatic license is no crime, but Singth’s script conflates and compresses events in a way that isn’t always productive. For example, the movie implies that the threat of a National Enquirer story exposing Hansen’s extramarital affair contributed to his journalistic recklessness. That story really happened, but not until 2011, years after To Catch a Predator had been cancelled. Primetime also presents Hansen as such an affectless weirdo that the revelation he had a consensual affair with an age-appropriate partner who was not a subordinate at work elicits not a gasp but a sigh of relief. After 75 minutes or so of Hansen never blinking and declaring to associates and strangers alike that he’s “cleansing the world of an ancient evil,” we’re just glad he isn’t himself preying on children, or targeting women with the intention of sewing himself a skin suit.
All of this is complicated by the fact that Hansen’s show and its fallout were the subject of Predators, a documentary by David Osit released at this time last year. Oppenheim, meanwhile, is an accomplished documentarian making his feature debut with Primetime—even though media executive Jeff Zucker, who was running NBC at the time of Hansen’s ascent, turns up as himself! Maybe it’s a bit of retroactive reputation-mending, as Oppenheim brings him in just long enough for him to tell Pattinson’s Hansen that he doesn’t personally care for To Catch a Predator, but the ratings don’t lie and it’s his job to give the people what they want.
What I want is more features from Oppenheim; his gift for tension and discomfiture is undeniable. And the murky ethics of this hit-piece-as-thriller are, if nothing else, a solid marriage of form and content.
Primetime (R, 110 mins.) opens at area theaters today, Sept. 25.
