Robert Pattinson's Primetime hates Chris Hansen
Primetime is a chaotic, spiralling dark comedy is off-putting and strange. But more than that, it attempts to take down Chris Hansen.
Lance Oppenheim directed takedown of Chris Hansen's To Catch a Predator pulls no punches
Jackson Weaver · CBC News
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It's 9 p.m. on a Wednesday. Do you know where your children are?
If you're the fictionalized version of To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen portrayed by Robert Pattinson in A24's Primetime, you're convinced you do — at least, you've convinced your network you know where everybody else's are.
This Hansen explains, drink in hand, to his airplane seatmate: it's what got his show greenlit in the first place. As he tells his executives, children aren't off roaming the streets or falling down wells. They're alone in their rooms. But outside, Hansen says, is a man standing on the porch, genitalia in hand. And in movie-Hansen's shockingly vulgar description that we're not going to fully quote here: he's about to charge up to that bedroom.
But if his audience just watches To Catch a Predator tonight on NBC, Hansen pitches, he'll tell them how to stop him.
WATCH | Primetime trailer:
The value of that advice he's offering is obvious to anyone familiar with what happened on that 2004 show. The Dateline series had Hansen pop out of closets and bedrooms to confront alleged child predators his team had lured there — and that infamously led to failed prosecutions, dangerous copycats and at least one death.
But Primetime is anything but a strait-laced critique. What spins out from the movie charting this fraught history is a whirligig of obscenity and oddity. It's a chaotic, spiralling dark comedy. And one so off-putting (it is produced by The Strange Thing About the Johnsons' Ari Aster, after all) you're not even shocked when it pairs that offhand humour with stomach-churning horror.
We see Tony Revolori (Spider-Man: Homecoming) making bug-eyed, intentionally ridiculous faces at the camera along with images of butchered children's bodies abandoned in a nameless jungle. We see Pattinson's Hansen inexplicably projectile-spitting mouthwash into a sink — while standing in a bent-arms, leaned-forward pose that looks less like a journalist, and more like an attacking goose.
And then, later, we see that same goose-man chasing down an actual monster, a personification of what is supposedly lurking outside of society. But as he keeps looking for that evil outside of himself, and stares into the face of evil, we stare right back into his.
There's a high-wire act of unself-conscious commitment-to-the-bit that Pattinson so often brings to his roles: a seeming incapability to feel embarrassment that allows him to dive completely into accents, impersonations and general absurdity.
Here, that's a campy, elevated, Spirit Halloween version of Chris Hansen: one that drawls "Why don't you take a seat" with a gravelly self-seriousness that, in anyone else's hands, would just read as ridiculous.
As director Lance Oppenheim and writer Ajon Singh would have us believe, all those over-the-top affectations are really meant to expose a deep rot at the centre of the real man. Because based as it is on the blistering article "Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die," about a shocking outcome to one of his stings, Primetime is not exactly a fan of Hansen's Dateline series. Echoing criticism — and even court rulings — against the ensuing "Creep Catcher" groups that would copy To Catch a Predator's modus operandi, this screenplay offers deep and obvious condemnations.
Which makes it evident as to why the real Chris Hansen hasn't exactly made himself a friend to the project.
Instead, he says he bought his own trailers ahead of the movie, to say the story you're about to see is completely fabricated. Like the Church of Latter-day Saints did in the Playbill for The Book of Mormon, he'll point audiences toward his own tome of content where, he says, the true story lies.
The true-crime streaming network he's since built continues to release content around sexual offences. An unending slew of new shows follow the format of, and capitalize on audiences' insatiable appetite for, the public-shaming vigilantism of To Catch a Predator.
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The critical read of Primetime's funhouse-mirror interpretation is right there. Instead of giving Predator's seemingly righteous goals even a tiny bit of credit, Oppenheim makes it his rhetorical aim to deliberately deconstruct Hansen's assumed self-interest while unreservedly humanizing his targets.
Throughout Hansen's interactions with a harried and hapless producer (Merritt Wever), a clearly traumatized and exploited "decoy" actor used for luring these alleged criminals (Skyler Gisondo) and the empathetically depicted subjects themselves, Primetime's message is clear.
Glassy-eyed, preening and frantic Hansen does not run Predator as some sacred calling, the film says. He does not manipulate local police forces into bypassing laws around search and seizure, wake up his barely grade-school sons in the middle of the night to watch his latest catch or stare hatefully at NBC reporter Stone Phillips reporting on "real" news because he's performing some sacred calling.
In the eyes of Primetime, he's doing it because he wants just that: to be on prime time.
That alone wouldn't be enough. The idea that respectability died first on the airwaves is obvious to the point of insulting; it wasn't enough to float the sci-fi commentary on capitalism The Running Man last year, and it's not enough to float the Rupert Murdoch/Larry Lamb biopic Ink that showed at this year's TIFF.
Neither is it enough to merely acknowledge the existential fear around stranger danger that has fuelled political campaigns and platforms of the past 50 years. From the genuinely moving, loosely inspired adaptation of six-year-old Etan Patz's disappearance in Without a Trace to the abysmally exploitative child-trafficking film Sound of Freedom, the blinding fear around the vulnerability of children already clearly motivates us.
What Primetime gets at is more probative, and more unsettling. A question not necessarily about self-delusion, but about how a lack of humanity seems justified, even encouraged, when dealing with Hansen's subjects.
It's a topic raised by that same airplane seatmate, who asks Hansen whether he ever wants to skip the justice system and just "bleed" the men he catches.
And it's a proposition Hansen considers, then says that just maybe, what he's doing is worse. And then he smiles.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jackson Weaver is a reporter and film critic for CBC's entertainment news team in Toronto. You can reach him at jackson.weaver@cbc.ca.
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