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In the early 2000s, if your idea of a cheap thrill was to see presumed sicko pedophiles caught on camera as they advance upon their ostensibly underage prey, NBC’s To Catch a Predator was your show. The host, Chris Hansen, had once been considered a serious journalist, spearheading investigative reports on events like the Columbine shootings and the World Trade Center attacks. But on the sleazy, sensationalistic To Catch a Predator, he was more of a vigilante showman. The show worked like this: A crusading organization called Perverted Justice would initiate conversations in online chatrooms designed to attract potential sex offenders. Then they’d be lured to sting houses outfitted with hidden cameras, where Hansen and his crew would await their arrival, ready to enact a pruriently dramatic Gotcha! moment, generally followed by an arrest. Nobody likes a pedophile, and without leaving the Barcalounger, viewers could revel in the self-congratulatory certainty that they too were helping to keep the world safe for the kiddos.
Documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim’s first fiction feature Primetime—premiering here at the Venice Film Festival—fills in some background pixels on the show’s rise and fall, focusing particularly on an ambitious, egotistical, and at least somewhat delusional Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson. It’s 2006, and Hansen and his beleaguered producer Andie (Merritt Wever, bringing an edgy nervousness to the role of a woman struggling to stay afloat in the ruthless world of TV news) get a chance to move their show into a primetime slot. The stakes are high, but the potential rewards are great. Hansen’s hubris balloons, and he infects others with his own inflated sense of the public service he claims to be providing. To complete its mission of reeling in the bad guys, the show employs youthful-looking decoys posing as underage kids. One of these is an elflike performer named Del (singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers) who can impersonate either a boy or a girl; she passes some tips along to a nervous newcomer who will come to be known as Decoy Dan (Skyler Gisondo, in a performance laced with touching eagerness). Though he hopes to become a real actor and thinks this is his way in, he wants to quit when he sees how demeaning the gig actually is. But Hansen, with his crocodile smile and purring, almost sultry intonation, persuades him to stick with it, assuring him that he’ll be helping to cleanse the world of evil.
Hansen has gotten high on what he perceives as his own power, and his ambitions grow even greater as he and his team try to draw in a “whale,” ideally a major government figure, rather than the pathetically sad—though still dangerous and repellent—lowlifes who tend to creep into their trap. These thankless roles are heroically played by an assortment of actors including Tony Revolori; despite his character’s unsavory and illegal intentions, his tremulous shock at being caught underscores the show’s legally questionable entrapment methods.
Hansen’s unfolding mania is one of the chief features of Primetime, and Pattinson’s performance is one of the only reasons to see it. As he practices dialogue that he’ll use in the show, drawn from the chatroom fodder that has lured the show’s marks into its trap, he relishes the prurient material a little too much: “I will undress you, you will undress me.” His theatrically precise diction is both disturbing and weirdly alluring.
Still, it’s not exactly clear what Primetime is aiming for: it seems to be making the point that while sexual predators are unequivocally bad, the people who make trash TV—particularly a sordid show that’s masquerading as a means of protecting kids and meting out justice—are also immoral, scheming, and just all-around unpleasant. That’s a shaky equivalence. Oppenheim, director of docs like Spermworld and Some Kind of Heaven, structures the film as if he were shaping a mosaic from disorienting shards; sometimes the scenes feel jaggedly disconnected. He and cinematographer David Bolen have given the picture a grubby, grainy look, including sections that mimic early-2000s-style video recording. If you feel dirty watching it, that’s by design—and if you enjoy feeling dirty, that’s your choice.
