Primetime puts television under the microscope

In a sign of the unrelenting march of time, films are now being made about the television landscape of the mid-2000s.

They said it couldn’t be done, but there is finally a movie where the polar bear episode of Lost is a plot point in an Oscar-tipped movie.

Primetime puts the hit American television show To Catch A Predator under the microscope.

To Catch A Predator burned very bright and burned very fast; 20 years later, this movie attempts to pick up the pieces and figure out what went wrong.

A never-better Robert Pattinson stars as Chris Hansen, the host of the television series dedicated to catching sexual predators.

Pattinson stole the show in The Odyssey – no mean feat, considering the stacked cast – and the chameleon-like actor is front and centre here.

Pattinson portrays Hansen like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth, this unknowable, strange man who isn’t 100% human.

The real Hansen often acted as if he had just landed down from Mars, and Pattinson does a terrific job of capturing how eccentric the real Hansen is.

At the height of his Twilight stardom, Pattinson was using his clout to get esoteric David Cronenberg dramas financed; Pattinson’s performance here recalls the weirdest, oddball Cronenberg protagonists such as James Woods in Videodrome or Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.

Pattinson has never been nominated for an Oscar; we suspect that between this movie and The Odyssey, it is very likely he will finally get his flowers this year.

The trailer for Primetime went viral during the summer and helped power this film to a healthy box office performance in the States; Pattinson’s oddball, vampiric performance is the main reason to see this movie.

If you dig deeper, however, you will find a rich and rewarding film waiting to be discovered.

Director Lance Oppenheim (director of the eagerly anticipated Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything, hitting Irish cinemas on November 20) uses his documentary background to great effect here; he has an uncanny ability to make the footage look like how television used to look in 2006.

Oppenheim is just 30 years old, but clearly has an affinity for the era of television that is depicted in Primetime.

Primetime has brains to burn; it draws a line from the events of 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to the distrust of other people that permeated American culture during the Bush administration.

Oppenheim deploys a very distinct style of cinematography where natural light sources are massively blown out and saturated, creating an effect that makes scenes look like a Nine Inch Nails music video.

Oppenheim has a lot of fun aping the aesthetics of 2000s television, which creates the clever effect of making the viewers think about the television they watched 20 years ago and tying their nostalgia up in the murky ethics deployed by To Catch A Predator.

The genius of Primetime is having the movie then twist the knife and telling the audience they were complicit in it.

The film doesn’t stop and have Robert Pattinson address the camera, telling the audience they were wrong for enjoying shows like To Catch A Predator or Big Brother or The X Factor; it is all communicated through subtext.

Primetime’s thesis is that the embrace of these shows 20 years ago directly resulted in the distrustful society we are living in now.

An early scene has Hansen, flying in first class, meeting a fan of the show and being thanked for his service in catching child predators.

The fan says that the law should not apply to people who hurt children, but Hansen simply replies that isn’t for him to decide; his only concern is how many viewers the show can get.

Films like Network and The Insider depict the dark, seedy underbelly of how television works, and Primetime is a new addition to the genre.

People who know the story of how everything went wrong for Chris Hansen will enjoy how the film manages to wring tension out of the inevitable; people who aren’t familiar with the circumstances in which To Catch A Predator went off the air will be surprised.

The movie spells it out; Hansen sees himself as a righteous moral crusader with a messiah complex, and he is carrying out a public service with his show.

Thanks to Pattinson’s performance, the film takes on the air of a psychological thriller as opposed to the traditional biopic people expected.

The unexpected strength of Primetime is that, despite Pattinson being the face on the poster and the most famous name in the cast, the film is more of an ensemble piece.

Merritt Wever, one of those actors you’ve seen in a million TV shows but can never place, deserves just as much praise for her role as Hansen’s embattled producer.

Hansen is the man in front of the camera and the star of the show, but it is Wever’s producer who keeps things moving and keeps the budget tight.

Anyone who has ever worked in media will instantly recognise the kind of hard-ass that Wever is playing, the producer who won’t take no for an answer and has to keep a lot of plates spinning.

If Pattinson is the Id, then Wever is the Ego; anytime the two share a scene together, there is an electricity to the film.

The unexpected standout is Skyler Gisondo as a decoy used by the show; he auditions for the show with the aim of padding out his CV and becoming an actor with on-screen credits, but Hansen soon takes him under his wing as his protege.

The relationship between Hansen and Gisondo takes on a father-son approach, and that adds another layer to the strange dynamics at play in Primetime.

There is a slightly off-kilter feeling to Primetime that you can’t quite put your finger on; it is documenting real events that happened over 20 years ago, but it feels like it took place in a world that we can’t quite recognise.

If it wasn’t already obvious, this is a film we enjoyed quite a bit; Primetime is the kind of film that you will chew on for weeks and is the perfect launching pad for discussion about the role of media among young people who have largely turned their back on traditional media.

Primetime takes place in the zone right between when advertising revenue meant that people who worked in the media were still well-paid, but the internet was just taking over as the main form of communication.

Primetime’s decision to recontextualise something we already lived through is a masterstroke; Pattinson is a strong bet to receive an Oscar nomination for his performance here, but the cast around him, the direction, editing and cinematography also deserve merit.

In our review for The Social Reckoning, we lamented that Aaron Sorkin directed that film instead of David Fincher; in the case of Primetime, we now have the best film that David Fincher never directed.