Documentarian Lance Oppenheim directs his first narrative film project with Ajon Singh’s script Primetime, based off the Esquire article Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die. The article is a rundown of an event surrounding the hit reality television program To Catch a Predator that ran from 2004-2007. If you are unfamiliar with the show, journalist Chris Hansen has people pretend to be underage girls and boys online to lure pedophiles to a location where he is lying in wait with cameras to interrogate these men, publicly shame, and then hand them over to the police. Good work if you can get it, in all honestly. But what Primetime focuses on is a core issue with Hansen, the show To Catch a Predator, and America at large. A problem reflected in the reality that because of the way this show was done, subverting any kind of legal system, broadcasting these men across the country, many of them never faced any kind of justice the show was purported to be delivering.
Primetime, like many docudramas is less concerned with “facts” than the kinds of films Oppenheim made in the past, that being documentary. It’s all about the energy of the story, and Director Oppenheim captures the tech soaked streets of the mid aughts in perfect detail. From the saturation of the colors, to the ABC fall lineup, we are steeped in the post 9/11 craze of American exceptionalism. And at the center of Primetime‘s nationalistic energy, the idea that being American is relishing an unadulterated gratefulness for being a part of the American experiment, is Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson). A journalist on the Dateline team, at the opening of the film he is already well underway on his program To Catch a Predator, and the ratings are ratcheting up, up, and away. The Hansen of the movie (and to some extent the Hansen of real life) seems less interested in bring these men to justice than he is in making his ratings climb. He never shows so much joy as when the network executive puts Predator up against ABCs massive show of the week Lost. “We’re gonna be bigger than Lost!” he screams alongside his producing partner Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) as they leave their production meeting.
As their ratings get bigger and bigger, their greed matches the size. So much so that they put one of their decoys (young looking adults that are present to lure the would be criminals into the filming location), Dan Plumb, in increasingly more and more precarious situations. Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), nicknamed by Hansen “Decoy Dan” is flashed by a man his first day on set. This is not some criminal justice mastermind, the whole reason he wants to get cast on Predator is to earn his SAG card. He’s a queer coded muscical theater fan, and only the charm of Chris Hansen, the same exact charm he uses on the subject of his show, can get him to buy in to this unusual acting opportunity. Dan operates as the naive heart of the audience, someone who so badly wants to believe that what he’s doing is important.
This strange charisma of Chris Hansen is the heart of what makes Pattinson’s performance so effective. He reveals himself in the beginning of the film, at the top of the stairs holding his arms out in a Christlike pose. The way Hansen enters camera is always shocking. It’s something you can find on YouTube easily enough, the way that Chris Hansen was able to speak to these men, get them to do what he wants, bend them completely to hiswill. It’s magnetic on the television program, and it’s magnetic in Pattinson’s performance. Much like the movie, Pattinson is less interested in being a chameleon of Hansen than in honoring the energy he brings when he strolls into the shot. “You see how this looks, right?” uttered as he gestures towards his mark. It’s a performance that fits perfectly into the film that Oppenheim is making.
Primetime is asking a lot of questions of us. It’s not necessarily asking us to have sympathy with would be pedofiles, but it is treating them as human, so empathy is not hard to find, even if we don’t quite get to sympathy. But more than anything it’s concerned with the same fever pitch that lead a nation to war in Iraq in the time period it’s set in. A terrible crime is being committed, or has been, but is this the right way to solve it? And is our determination to fix the issue as holy as we claim it to be? The internet that we live on has certainly been used to wage a war on pedofiles on both sides of the political spectrum, and the sensationalism at the heart of that problem is difficult not to buy into. Hansen asks himself twice in the film, “What would have happened if I hadn’t been here?” a question that has two meanings at the points in the film it is posed. The hope to do good, especially when shrouded in our own wants is difficult to maintain in its purity, even with the best of intentions.
4/5
