I think I have it now. Robert Pattinson wasn’t made to play heroes, even though he gets cast that way because of how he looks. He’s much better when he’s playing guys who are weak (The Drama), crazy (The Lighthouse), overconfident (The King), obsessive (Damsel), or just stupid (Mickey 17). Male fragility is precisely where he is strongest, and the latest piece of evidence is in Primetime, which gives him a role that suits him unlike any other.
He portrays NBC reporter Chris Hansen as a preening, stuck-up actor, and as such, he delivers some of the best bad acting I’ve ever seen. Every gesture and every line reading feels overrehearsed and overdone. His conception of Hansen as an empty suit without conscience or morals makes the film into the tragedy of a hollow man, as well as red meat for all my fellow print journalists who believe that TV reporters are all hair and no brains. If you need any further proof of how great he is, consider how pissed the real Chris Hansen is. This movie hits a nerve.
The story takes place in the fall of 2006, as Chris has already launched To Catch a Predator as part of Dateline NBC. Its ratings success inspires NBC head of programming Jeff Zucker (who portrays himself) to give the show a prime slot opposite ABC’s Lost. At the same time, freckle-faced aspiring Hollywood actor Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo) attracts the show’s attention because he looks younger than his 23 years, and so Predator’s producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) hires him to impersonate 13-year-old boys and invite pedophiles into trap houses before Chris swoops in and invites them to have a seat. Within minutes of arriving for his first job, Dan is alone in a kitchen talking to a man who has dropped his pants and sprayed Cool Whip on his penis (Jonathan Lipnicki — yes, the little boy from Jerry Maguire).
This movie looks like crap, which is a deliberate choice by director Lance Oppenheim, who previously made the documentary Some Kind of Paradise. He shoots everything on the sort of analog cameras that were available in the mid-2000s, and frequently emphasizes the performative aspect of To Catch a Predator. Dan shaves off his body hair and practices lightening his voice to be a more convincing pre-teen. Meanwhile, Chris demands so many takes when recording his narration that the sound technician loses patience: “Guy thinks he’s Mike fucking Wallace!”
Another decoy who portrays both underage girls and boys (played by the Grammy-winning indie singer Phoebe Bridgers) comes to Dan and tells him that he’ll destroy himself if he approaches the gig like just another acting job. When Chris and the Predator crew arrive in Collin County, the police force in the town of Murphy put on a cheesy little pageant to welcome them. Everybody here wants to be on TV, and it warps their ethics and judgment. The filmmakers couldn’t resist having one of the Murphy cops declare his hatred of child rapists while ordering Jared’s special at a Subway sandwich shop.
The script is based on Luke Dittrich’s article for Esquire “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die.” The names of the people around Hansen have been changed, and it is fascinating to compare this with Predators, David Osit’s documentary from last year about Hansen’s rise and fall. The documentary interviews Dan’s real-life analogue, who proclaims that he wouldn’t repeat his experience for any amount of money, and Hansen himself, who expresses total contempt for the present-day YouTube vigilantes for doing the same stuff he did. What Primetime adds to the article and the documentary is that Chris is desperate to catch a “whale,” i.e. a high-profile child molester whose arrest would make national headlines, to beat Lost in the ratings and get the National Enquirer off his back about his own extramarital affair. The movie does not mention that Jeffrey Epstein, who would definitely qualify as a whale, is right there for the taking in 2006, which is a shame.
I do wish Ajon Singh’s script hadn’t resorted so often to characters trying to make amends with their loved ones over the phone only to be interrupted by new developments in the story that they’re chasing. This is a minor issue, though, compared with one scene where a rabbi (Bob Ari) caught in Chris’ snare does not break down in tears and beg for mercy like the other pedophiles. Instead, he seizes Chris’ wrist and furiously demands, “Who the fuck are you? What gives you the right to do this?” Chris acts like a giant weenie in the face of this and later lashes out at Andie with the old “you can’t understand because you don’t have kids” line. No wonder she’s thinking about jumping ship to ABC.
(And amid the other great performances here, it’s great to see the Emmy-winning Wever finally sink her teeth into the layers of a film role.)
The whole sordid episode that leads to the suicide of Collin County Assistant District Attorney Bill Conradt (Alex Winter) demonstrates that both journalism and law enforcement are perverted — pun definitely intended — when they work together so closely. The movie achieves its highest pathos when the police and the Predator crew surround Bill’s house, and Dan, who shares Bill’s love of Broadway musicals, calls him and sings “Seasons of Love” from Rent for him during the man’s last moments. It helps no one when sting operations are turned into a spectator sport. Or rather, it only helps people like Chris, who does not care one bit about the children he is incessantly claiming to save.
Primetime works best as a character study of a bad journalist driven by the idea of becoming bigger than Dateline host Stone Phillips (Bill Heck), whom the movie shows doing real journalism by traveling to Iraq and reporting on the fall of Saddam Hussein. Chris imagines himself as a hero cleansing the world of evil, where we see him clearly as a ten-cent narcissist preying on even smaller men for ratings numbers. Robert Pattinson brings that quality to such life that he seems creepier than the pedophiles. What an achievement.
Primetime/a>
Starring Robert Pattinson and Skyler Gisondo. Directed by Lance Oppenheim. Written by Ajon Singh, based on Luke Dittrich’s article. Rated R.
