Robert Pattinson’s Latest Is a Sleazy Movie About a Sleazy Show. It Could Become Just as Much of a Sensation.

Movies Robert Pattinson Is a Marvel in Primetime, but It’s Another Actor Who Gives Its Most Memorable Performance So you want to see the slimy, voyeuristic movie about the slimy, voyeuristic show. You see how this looks, right? By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Sam Adams? Sept 25, 202610:59 AM A24 Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. We enter the world of Primetime through the unblinking eye of a security camera, as NBC journalist Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) closes in on his latest target: a Marine combat veteran (Tony Revolori) who has arranged to meet a teenager for sex. The sting house where Hansen and his To Catch a Predator crew have set up shop is fitted with hidden cameras that reduce MarriedAndLookingForFun31313—the only name he is ever given—to a dot in the corner of the frame, a tiny part of a much larger machine. But unlike him, Chris Hansen is ready for his close-up. Although its time on the air was brief—a mere 20 episodes aired between November 2004 and December 2007—To Catch a Predator was a pop-culture sensation, fusing the thrill of vicarious vigilantism with the compulsive rubbernecking of reality TV. The show was released as a spinoff of NBC’s flagship newsmagazine Dateline, and Hansen touted his involvement with law enforcement, both professional and otherwise: He would tell his targets that they were “free to go,” but police officers were usually waiting right outside the door to arrest them, and he worked regularly with the group Perverted-Justice, whose operatives posed as teenagers in online chat rooms frequented by potential sexual predators. But what drove To Catch a Predator, what people tuned in for, was the moment Hansen stepped through a door with one of his carefully practiced quips, and the camera crews swooped in to capture the face of a man realizing that the life he’d known was gone forever. In Primetime, director Lance Oppenheim lingers on Hansen’s pre-sting ritual, zooming in on his mouth as if the TV journalist is a hungry lion scouring the savannah, and cinematographer David Bolen, whose filmography is rife with titles like Delhi Crime and I Was a Teenage Felon, shoots in a lurid palette that has less to do with the aesthetics of network television than it does with the Saw series. Pattinson’s performance is a marvel of grinning grotesquerie, so stilted in his attempts to sound casual that you half expect his face to swing open and reveal a tiny alien at the controls. But Ajon Singh’s script doesn’t give him anywhere to go. The character starts as a vacuous fame monster, willing to do anything to boost his ratings and his own profile, and he ends that way too. I’ve gone this far without comparing Primetime to David Osit’s brilliantly thorny documentary Predators, but there’s no way for me to get around measuring the two against each other. Osit’s movie builds to an interview with Hansen himself, but it doesn’t make the mistake of thinking he’s the most interesting, or even the most important, character in the story. Like Predators, Primetime broadens its scope to include To Catch a Predator’s “decoys,” the adult (but not too adult) performers who posed as teens in the final phase of the program’s sting operations. (The online chats were typically conducted by others.) There’s Del Harvey (Phoebe Bridgers), an advocate for victims of sexual exploitation who’s starting to doubt whether a staged shaming on network TV is the most effective tactic for curbing real-life predation, and Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), a struggling actor who’s just looking for a big enough part to get his union card. Osit talks to decoys who are still traumatized by their part in the show, including the fatally miscalculated setup that led to its abrupt cancellation. (Del Harvey’s name isn’t changed, but Dan Plumb appears to be based on Dan Schrack, who was selected as the bait for the assistant district attorney who killed himself as a SWAT team working with the To Catch a Predator team closed in.) But Primetime plays the moment when a decoy turns to find that a grown man has dropped his pants and slathered his genitals in Cool Whip for nervous laughs, not as an assault narrowly avoided. Pattinson’s ghoulish grin has already made for a delectable meme, but it’s Gisondo who gives Primetime’s most layered and soulful performance, perhaps because he’s the only character who definitively has a soul to begin with. We certainly feel Hansen’s resentment and insecurities, the way he bristles at the approach of marquee Dateline anchor Stone Phillips (an even oilier Bill Heck) and wakes his young sons to let them know that Daddy’s show is being programmed in the same time slot as Lost. (In an oddly sublime bit of casting, former NBC executive Jeff Zucker plays a lightly satanic version of himself, pushing Hansen to get Predator’s numbers up regardless of the cost.) But Gisondo’s Dan is young and green enough to be convinced he’s working for the greater good, not just boosting NBC’s stock price. He might be the only person in the movie who qualifies as a victim. Oppenheim is largely a documentary filmmaker—his projects, many of them shot by Bolen, include Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, and Ren Faire—and Primetime might have benefited from the documentarian’s understanding that the most fascinating character isn’t always the one you set out to follow in the first place. (I expect his attraction to eccentric egotists will be put to good use in the Elizabeth Holmes doc You Can See Everything, which he co-directed with Nathan Fielder.) Primetime is effectively scuzzy and succeeds in making you feel like you’ve committed some kind of transgression just by sitting in front of it. You don’t just watch the movie; it watches you. Crime Journalism Sexual Assault TV Documentaries Reality TV