Courtney Howard // Film Critic
PRIMETIME
Rated R, 1 hour and 50 minutes
Directed by: Lance Oppenheim
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Skyler Gisondo, Merritt Wever, Matthew Maher, Phoebe Bridgers, Bokeem Woodbine, Alex Winter, Tony Revolori, Anna Faris, Jeff Zucker, Caroline Hebert
On November 5, 2006, Texas assistant district attorney Bill Conradt Jr. shot himself when police raided his home as part of a sting operation in conjunction with NBC’s TO CATCH A PREDATOR. Yet it’s the snowballing events in the months prior that Lance Oppenheim’s PRIMETIME places under the microscope. Based on the Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline, This Man Will Die,” Oppenheim and adapting writer Ajon Singh’s satirical biopic examines what was percolating behind the scenes of the show, from the mounting pressure at the network for a hit to host Chris Hansen’s prickly tendencies taking hold, escorting reality TV and the news media into morally murky territory.
The film opens in 2006, on the modus operandi of the TV program – captured on a VHS tape aesthetic and 4:3 aspect ratio – as their latest catch arrives at the staged trap house replete with cookies. Pedophile MarriedAndLookingForFun31313 (Tony Revolori) enters the home acknowledging his chats with show decoy Del (Phoebe Bridgers) before host Hansen (Robert Pattinson) dramatically descends the staircase, catching his mark completely off-guard, reciting the explicit online chats before launching into his trademark introduction. Replete with a smooth panning POV switch, this cold open provides all the information we need to know about the series and its newsman-turned-reality-show-host – or so we think. The curtain is about to be pulled back.
Our story at hand triangulates on three characters: Hansen, his dedicated producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) and naive actor Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo). Each individual wants to make their stake in the business, but each is forced to face a series of obstacles. Hansen’s marriage to wife Mary (Anna Faris) is crumbling due to his cheating, self-destructive ways. Andie has hitched her identity to the show’s success, mothering her staff while keeping a watchful eye on the production. Dan is unwittingly thrown into their hectic world when he answers a secret casting call looking for another decoy, playing younger than his years to entrap an assortment of perps whom law enforcement arrests and the show exploits in the name of entertainment. Their situations escalate once NBC boss Jeff Zucker (playing himself) assigns them a primetime slot in the lineup. And with everything on the line, Chris, Andie and Dan await a big fish to take their bait.
Connecting their struggles conjures both sympathy and empathy in equal measure. The filmmakers depict Hansen as a narcissistic egomaniac, who wakes his young children up to watch him on TV catching predators. He also engages in a hilariously adversarial relationship with news anchor Stone Phillips and frets about the National Enquirer exposing his dark secret affair with a mistress (Caroline Hebert). Still, his inner struggle reveals his hidden dichotomy, wanting to rid the world of monsters out to hurt innocent children. Andie’s internal and external conflicts have her wrestling with her career goals, tying her identity to an unfaithful man whilst entertaining an offer to produce “feel good reality TV” as a better option to salacious journalism. Dan’s journey takes a more traditional path where he learns through experience that he’s made a Faustian bargain for financial stability and job security at the cost of his mental health.
Thematically, Oppenheim toys around with the symbolic notion of mirrors and glass surfaces often reflecting, distorting, obscuring and refracting the image of self. When characters stare through windows, we think of the transparency (the ironic lack thereof) they’ll never attain due to their clouded secrecies. The film’s most profound metaphor, showing one of the production’s digital cameras accidentally knocked into a pool during a rainstorm, is almost innocuous, yet speaks volumes as to where the characters are at that point, absolutely waterlogged with little hope of being salvaged or reclaimed.
Pattinson doesn’t try to physically resemble Hansen, but is an uncanny sound-alike stand-in. He nails the speech cadence, inflections and tonality, building a heightened, decidedly fictionalized portrait of the flawed anti-hero from the inside out. Hansen’s essence is threaded throughout Pattinson’s diabolically complex performance. Gisondo imbues his twenty-something character’s coming-of-age with nuance, vulnerability and pathos. He’s quietly commanding, showing a participant’s own innocence lost within the show’s chaotic ethos. Thanks to Pattinson’s delivery of the line, Gisondo’s destined to have “Decoy Dan!” shouted at him by people on the street from here on out.
Adopting a darkly outlandish tone suitably fits the hijinks and hilarity of the true-life tale. It’s assuredly ludicrous how cavalier the news media and police institutions acted for the sake of salacious reality TV. Oppenheim and Singh don’t shy away from capturing such shenanigans accordingly, where we root for the ethically deranged newsperson and his right-hand woman to nab the perverts they’ve lured into their own tangled webs they’ve woven. Although the film and its filmmakers do stop short of asking whose behavior is worse (since, duh, it’s always the criminal’s), it does give us ample reasons to question who is acting responsibly in these situations. The answer it comes up with is no one.
The 3rd act gets more than a little muddled narratively once show director Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher) inevitably nabs their white whale, Conradt (Alex Winter). The filmmakers don’t make it clear how Conradt wouldn’t have seen or been privy to the show’s presence in Murphy, Texas considering the big welcome wagon Sherriff Cortland Gunn (Bokeem Woodbine) rolled out very publicly for the production. It’s also at this moment Hansen begins to have detrimental psychotic breaks without any motivations for such things connoted. It plays a bit antithetical to the maniacal personality we were first introduced to. His crisis of confidence needed an inciting incident to trigger that level of psychosis.
PRIMETIME’s final notes aren’t of closure or a definitive reckoning for Hansen and his partner-in-crime Andie. It shrugs off any notion of providing those melodramatic elements for the audience. Perhaps it feels it’s not its job to do so. But it also doesn’t lead to a serviceable point in its commentary. Sentiments ruminating on the media and law enforcement’s culpability in this mess where someone died aren’t as sharply pointed as hoped.
Grade: 3.5 out of 5
PRIMETIME opens in theaters on September 25.
