PRIMETIME Reviewed by GREG KING
Director: Lance Oppenheim
Stars: Robert Pattinson, Skylar Gisondo, Merritt Wever, Matthew Maher, Phoebe Bridgers, Anna Faris, Bokeem Woodbine, Alex, Winter, Tony Revolori, Jonathan Lipnicki, Bob Ari, Matt Smith, David Fierro, Jeff Zucker, Sean Bridgers, Bill Herk, Caveh Zahedi, Jason Woliner, Eugene Kotlyarenko.
Based on a true story, Primetime is a challenging and morally murky drama that may appal many in the audience.
Emmy award winning journalist Chris Hansen hosted the popular reality television program To Catch A Predator, which ran as part of NBC’s Dateline before being spun off into its own series. The show which ran from 2004-2007 regularly drew in millions of viewers. The premise of this controversial show involved setting up sexual predators who preyed on young children and teens. Hansen and his team of anti-paedophilia vigilantes from the cyber watchdog group Perverted Justice would trawl the darker recesses of the internet to find these predators. They would be lured to a setting where they would be confronted by Hansen, exposed as a predator and arrested live on tv. But Hansen was determined to catch a “whale”, someone of importance or a powerful government figure, to make a huge impact and give the show greater ratings.
Hansen’s main lure for these predators was soft spoken and boyish looking 23-year-old aspiring actor Daniel Plum (played by Skylar Gisondo, from the tv show The Righteous Gemstones, etc), nick named “Decoy Dan”, and who pretended to be a vulnerable 13-year-old boy. Dan captured the attention of an alpha predator, who turned out to be the assistant attorney general of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Hansen pursued him with tragic consequences when their high-profile target committed suicide. That controversial episode was never aired, and the show was eventually canned.
To Catch A Predator basicallygave birth to the reality tv concept which largely replaced scripted dramas and sitcoms as a staple of prime-time television viewing. Primetime explores the morally bankrupt trainwreck so-called reality television shows which exploit human drama, weakness, and tragedy for entertainment purposes.
The self-centred and egotistical Hansen is played here by Robert Pattinson, who continues to find challenging material and interesting roles that stretch him dramatically and allow him to move away from the sparkling vampire Edward Cullen from the Twilight series. Here he delivers a more complex performance as Hansen, depicting him as ambitious, obsessed, driven, ruthless and deeply flawed, concerned about his on-screen image but largely unconcerned at the human cost of his reporting. He makes Hansen an unlikeable protagonist. But this is not a conventional biopic, and audiences won’t learn too much detail about Hansen.
Emmy award winner Merritt Wever is good as Andie Bender, his producer who is driven to pursue personal success, but who begins to question the personal cost of being involved with the show. Her character is a fictitious composite of a number of producers who worked on the show. Gisondo also registers strongly as Decoy Dan, giving him a vulnerability and suitably troubled visage as he confronts some ugly truths, and he is one of the most sympathetic characters in the film.
The predators caught by Hansen’s sting operations are played by fellow filmmakers Caveh Zahedi, Jason Woliner, Eugene Kotlyarenko, as well as Tony Revolori (from The Grand Budapest Hotel, etc), Bob Ari, Matt Smith, David Fierro and former child star Jonathan Lipnicki (from Jerry McGuire, etc).
Primetime is the first feature script from Ajon Singh and is based on Luke Dittrich’s 2007 article Tonight On Dateline This Man Will Die, which was published by Esquire magazine. Singh has taken some liberties with the details for dramatic purposes. The film marks the fiction feature film directorial debut for Lance Oppenheim, a former documentary filmmaker (the forthcoming You Can See Everything, etc), who gives the film a gritty aesthetic with its washed-out colour palette.
Regular cinematographer David Bolen employs a range of film and video formats to give the material a more authentic look and texture and a sense of immediacy, and he often works in extreme close-up. He extensively uses grainy footage to replicate the vision captured by the hidden cameras that record the drama as Hansen exposes the predator on air. The film has a gritty, deliberately sleazy look that often makes for distressing and uncomfortable viewing.
★★★
