Primetime is not a story about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. It is not the story of a good man corrupted or a noble idea destroyed by the society it tried so earnestly to save.
It is, from the off, about a mercenary, amoral animal. This animal is reality TV, and its handlers cannot control it, or themselves. Primetime is a condemnation of masquerading justice that balances a bleak, pitch-black sense of humour with an expose of a greedy, twisted mindset. Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) is a presenter and executive producer of the hit show To Catch A Predator in the mid-noughties. As the show grows in popularity, Hansen and his team try desperately to push the envelope, with brutal results.
Primetime is about the dark heart behind the making of this kind of TV, and at the centre of that is Pattinson’s deftly risible portrayal of Hansen. He’s like a jackal on and off camera. On TV, he prowls around his targets, probing and snapping at them, breaking them down. Joyfully tormenting the condemned until he can squeeze no more cringe and abandoning them to the system for consumption. Behind the scenes, he skulks and writhes as pitifully as any of the men he exposes. His jealousy and rage at those with more credit than him push him to endlessly chase the bigger rating and the bigger target behind that, blocking out his own secret sexual infidelities with a mask of righteousness. This is often very funny, as his tantrums and self-aggrandising behaviour wander into the ludicrous. Pattinson captures a pathetic, deceptive, nasty human being with gleeful vigour.
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This performance is central to Primetime because it tells you so much of what makes To Catch A Predator such a heinous show. It’s about our culture’s obsession with pedophilia, how it gives us an excuse to persecute and punish without restraint. As abhorrent as we all find pedophilia, To Catch A Predator existed to televise a punishment and to give the audience a lurid sense of retribution. It was innately unjust and done for all the wrong reasons, and that’s what Primetime wants to show us.
Skyler Gisondo plays Dan, an actor desperate for his big break, being gently groomed by Chris to accept what they’re doing as a righteous cause. He plays him with a desperation and tragedy that captures an innocence lost. However, it’s Merritt Wever who is the other standout next to Pattinson, playing the perfect enabler of the show’s dark mission as producer Andie. She sacrifices a lot for the show, recognising that there’s something unstable yet unable to quite bring herself to get off the runaway train. She and Hansen have an opposite relationship to the problematic Sorkin archetype of a male/female professional partnership. There’s no romantic tension between them. Both use and mock the other and can only help each other to get deeper into the toxicity of the show. When Hansen discusses the affair coming out in the press with Andie, her first question is “How old is she?” Andie doesn’t trust Chris, doesn’t for a moment believe he’s above committing the same crime as the men they’ve been exposing. There’s a great sense of unease in the camera work; the daylight and shooting schedules have this overexposed pasty-ness as if everything is constantly under bad T.V lighting. At night, the world becomes a neo-noir horror, the blacks and blues bleeding into each other, creating a sense of something lurking in the shadows.
The real Chris Hansen has dismissed the film entirely as fiction, even alluding in a recent interview that director Lance Oppenheim might have some sort of hidden agenda. In many ways, you can’t blame him, as with all “true stories” taken to film, there’s plenty of artistic license. But he misses the point. Primetime is about why a group of people would make a show like To Catch A Predator and why we, the audience, would watch it. Neither answer is pleasant. It’s about the insane rush for ratings, the vindictive joy of righteous punishment and how these things inevitably lead to a twisted inversion of the morality of our world.
It’s not a subtle film; you get everything out of it that you expect. Primetime is a brilliant, caustic tale of TV gone insane anchored by a brilliant performance from one of the best actors of his generation. Funny, frightening and one of the best movies of the year.
★★★★★
In cinemas from October 30th / Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Matthew Maher and Bokeem Woodbine / Dir: Lance Oppenheim / A24 / 15
