Score: 5 / 5
Easily a favorite film of the year for me -- yes, already -- Primetime is exactly what I needed to see to start spooky season. A dark comedy masquerading as a thriller with elements of stark psychological horror baked in, this piece of drama preys off our cultural obsession with true crime while implicating us as users of similarly-acting social media. You want to see the ugliness of human society? Lean in, and help us shame those we collectively have decided are worth shaming.
No matter how you felt about it, To Catch a Predator took our country by storm in the mid-2000s. Essentially a vigilante documentary crew worked in tandem with actors and, eventually, law enforcement to lure pedophiles from online chatrooms to a sting house, where they'd be caught on camera in the act of preparing to have sex with a supposed minor. Enter Chris Hansen, the perhaps overly dramatic host, who leads the almost-criminal in a dance with hard-hitting questions about "what was about to happen here" and "what you would have done had I not intervened." Publicly shamed and often taken into custody for investigation and questioning afterward, the evildoers of society were being stopped before they could harm a child. Naturally, debates about entrapment and of course the show's salacious and graphic essence made it quite controversial, even to this day. But it's hard to think of the show itself as being bad when it was doing so much good. Right?
Primetime dramatizes the ethics of the show far more than it dramatizes any historical events. Written by Ajon Singh, the screenplay is foremost a dual character study of actors and what they're willing to do to make their craft more real. Is what's real for an actor their motivation or their affect? The preparation or the performance? And what are we to do with the icky feeling of making undesirable people (who are arguably also just victims of society using the internet to mitigate their problematic desires) victims in their own right? At one point, a rabbi is caught and accused by Hansen, and he asks the host, "By what right do you do this?" While the film's protagonist is, of course, Hansen, we're also pushed into the perspective of the lure: two young actors (played wonderfully by Skyler Gisondo and Phoebe Bridgers) are brought in as improviso performers and trained to look, dress, sound, and act enough like an underage kid that they can get the perp to enter the sting house long enough to be caught on camera. But nobody really prepares them for the psychological trauma you'd experience being face-to-face with a predator who wants you in those crucial, horrifying moments before the gig is up.
Much will be made of Robert Pattinson's performance in this movie as Chris Hansen, but I wanted to talk about those actor characters first both because their performances are no less transformative and brilliant but also because I had never considered their perspective before, despite having watched the show and its reruns. Those "lures," the bait, figured so briefly in the show -- and, surrounded as they were by crew and producers, they were surely very safe -- that I have never imagined what was going through their heads. How much was an intentional craft? We see Gisondo practicing for seemingly days, adjusting his voice in a higher register and meticulously shaving, using techniques from acting school; when, after his first episode airs, he asks his best friend about his performance, his friend basically says he was unnoticeable. Nobody watching the show cares about the intended victim. And that hit me hard because, well, neither did I. I don't think most of us did.
It's a similar approach to pseudo-reality as dramatized in May December, and actually this film has a similar tone and style. While we might agree with certain motivations or be able to empathize with certain feelings, none of these characters are clear-cut good or bad guys. If anything, they're all pretty bad, either enacting some kind of evil or reacting to some kind of evil in a way that also taints them. There's a line in John Patrick Shanley's play Doubt (and its excellent film adaptation, spoken by Meryl Streep's character Sister Aloysius) that reads, "When you take a step to address wrongdoing, you are taking a step away from God, but in his service," and that feels relevant here. What would you do to stop a predator? Does he have to have committed a crime first? To what extent can you entrap someone intent on committing a crime? These are difficult questions to answer, especially when the moral center to your efforts is also one of livelihoods, earning money and recognition, and fame.
That's what's represented by the character of Hansen in this film. His sleazy, antiheroic presence drives the film as a vehicle for Pattinson's expertly calculated performance. Rising above the criticisms of his methods, Hansen and his equally ambitious producer Andie (a chillingly cynical Merritt Wever) push the show to be more hard-hitting and more spectacular, eager to succeed in their new spot in titular prime time, when most families in America are settling down to watch an episode of tv before bedtime. They're up against ABC's Lost, for cryin' out loud, as multiple characters parrot in excited and awed timbre. But, as we're treated to the "inside scoop" of several shoots, it becomes difficult to root for them -- despite their obviously good goals of stopping some of the worst (or potentially worst) people in society -- as we see their venal vendettas play out as ploys for ratings and studio privileges. Most of Pattinson's time on screen is of Hansen before a "performance," as he rehearses his idiosyncratic inflections and enunciative quirks, actively creating the character we all know in real life as Chris Hansen.
Some will criticize this film for not being very realistic, of taking liberties with Hansen, maybe even of making him a bad guy (there is frank handling of his extramarital affairs in this film, though it never quite reaches fruition). But this isn't a biopic so much as it is a character study, and more of the persona and psychological profile of someone who might do what Hansen did. In Pattinson's work, Hansen becomes a vampiric firebrand, so sure that his work is righteous that he can take the time to develop himself personally and professionally, spending far too long rerecording the same voiceover narration for the show instead of researching a new case or moving on to the next sting. Rich cinematography by David Bolen (which deserves its own review... and awards) often captures close-ups on Hansen in the moments before he enters the room, a hungry gleam in his eye as he approaches the villain, eager to soak up his confusion, embarrassment, rage, indignation, self-pity, and remorse. Pattinson would give Bela Lugosi a run for his money.
The film does also bring up the obvious criticism that a show like this had the potential to drive someone -- who by any metric may not actually be a criminal and may be merely mentally disordered or ill -- to commit suicide, which of course did happen in 2006. That event signals the end of the film, leaving Hansen in a devastating (and devastated) awareness that his single-minded crusade had finally grown beyond his grasp and created deadly stakes with immediate effect. It's not dissimilar from Ahab's ill fate, and this climax comes on the telling verbalization that this particular sting was to catch "the whale," a codename indicating the biggest catch of the show's run, someone connected with upper government.
On top of all this high drama and thrilling, inspired-by-reality-you-remember resonance, the film also manages to tonally act not as hard-hitting investigative journalism nor as a historical treatise of entertainment but as a neo-Gothic opera. Thick stylizations in production design, lighting, sound and score, acting style, and of course cinematography make the viewing experience akin to Black Swan even as the plot, theme, and characters reminded me constantly of Nightcrawler. There's even a demonic figure who keeps appearing in Hansen's world, an apparent embodiment of ancient evil. The climax, during a violent thunderstorm, races to its bloody peak while ghostly memories flood Hansen's -- and our -- experience.
And yet it's also chock-full of genuinely funny moments, from dry recitations of perverse transcripts of chats to unexpected and grotesque facial reactions and vocal tics from Pattinson. You might come to the film to get a glance behind the scenes into how To Catch a Predator moved to primetime (a la Saturday Night), but this isn't that. You might stay to enjoy Pattinson's masterful performance as a crazed, wicked man trying to merely be better than his targets. But I found boundless pleasure in its formal elements, too, and will be long haunted by its focus: not criminals, the law, or even really the entertainment, but on the human faces of vigilantism and the spiritual toll on actors doing something practical with their craft.
