I’m writing from the sweaty cubby hole of a vaporetto, one that’s shipping me back and forth for the Venice Film Festival. It’s the fourth day, and so far it’s been a slightly downbeat operation. The good movies have been hard to find, with a few outright duds (the new Paul Schrader is shockingly misjudged) and a couple of lukewarm efforts from people capable of excellence (Ink, the new Danny Boyle film about the revival of The Sun newspaper, was fine to me). But we’re getting there. Next week I’ll go a little more in depth on the best thing I’ve seen here—a mesmerizing Derek Jarman doc called Queer Edward II—and parse through what’s left. Famously, the second week of Venice is light on quality. Good movies have already premiered, either at Telluride or TIFF, so the less exciting stuff is left over.
One exception is Primetime, which I saw on Friday evening in the second row of a packed cinema. The film is based on real life, and so I don’t think spoiler tags serve quite the same function, but if you want to experience Primetime purely as entertainment, then maybe hold off on reading this until it hits theaters: September 25 in the US, October 30 in the UK.
It’s likely that you know how Primetime ends already. 2006: Chris Hansen and the crew of Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator surround the plush Texas home of an assistant district attorney named Bill Conradt. This was a bending of the TV show’s strict formula. Typically, a suburban house rigged with cameras becomes the ensnarement spot for men suspected of being pedophiles, lured there via online conversations they have with decoys with the promise of sex. Then, Hansen surprises them. Conradt was one of these men, but he wasn’t budging from his home, and so they came to him. As the local police and a camera crew entered, a gunshot rang out. Before any face-to-face conversation was had, Conradt had killed himself.
This was the case that essentially unraveled To Catch a Predator, a perverse show captured in perverse detail in Primetime. The movie, produced by A24, directed by Lance Oppenheim, and starring Robert Pattinson as an spookily accurate Hansen, comes two years after the release of a documentary, Predators, that questioned the intentions of the hugely popular show. It chronicled the fallout of those who had been used as decoys, publicly stung, or who worked on it.
All of these characters are present in Primetime too, making it an interesting, unsettlingly compulsive companion piece. Though it has fictional elements to it, with several characters given different names and conversations imagined, the film is largely based on the Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die” by Luke Dittrich.
The purring voice of a man, his face shot in extreme close-up: “I will undress you as you undress me.” It’s Hansen, rehearsing excerpts of the chat log between an online predator and a teenage girl. He treats it like Shakespeare; in a few minutes, the predator who wrote those words will be downstairs. Del, a young decoy played by Phoebe Bridgers, androgynous and experienced enough to play both men and women, welcomes a man into her “parents” house. She baked cookies; he brought condoms. Then, Hansen comes down the stairs, reciting the practised lines from the man’s chat log that landed him there. He walks out the door and is promptly body-slammed by a police officer disguised as a bush.
Captured on camera, Primetime presents this frenetic, compulsive formula as the magic that transformed Hansen from an Emmy Award-winning journalist into a TV shock jockey. It works, and it makes people feel good: so good, in fact, that NBC wants to use it to plug the hole left by the death of the sitcom. All of a sudden, To Catch a Predator is primetime television, going toe-to-toe with Lost in the Wednesday night 9 p.m. slot.
Primetime is about power, how we use it, and the culture of intimidation. In the film, that intimidation propagates from a number of angles: Skyler Gisondo plays Dan, a 23-year-old cast to play a full decade younger than his age. On his first day, he’s late onto set, arriving almost in tandem with their target. Dressed in a green polo and swim shorts, he stumbles into the kitchen, nervous, as a 30-something guy (played, in a wild piece of casting, by Jonathan Lipnicki of Stuart Little and Jerry Maguire fame) reveals his genitals to him. He did not know this was the job he signed up for.
Meanwhile, a journalist from The National Enquirer has been stalking Hansen, capturing a photograph of him with his finger in a woman’s mouth over dinner, despite the fact he has a wife and children at home. Like his own prey, he too has been ensnared. It’s a strong enough revelation to send Hansen spinning, just as the demands of the show increase.
A call from the network comes: Lost now has polar bears, so they need to go bigger, or the show is chopped. A sting operator from Perverted Justice (Matthew Maher) thinks he has the answer: a big-dog government official speaking intermittently to who he thinks is a teenage boy. Suddenly, dealing with small-fry blue collar workers isn’t good enough—they need to take down a man who’ll become known as “the whale.”
The film has a great ensemble, with Merritt Wever getting a solid side plot as Hansen’s lead producer, while Bridgers is a natural, contributing a new song to the film called “On Video.” But it’s Pattinson and Gisondo who deliver the two career-best performances. Pattinson, known better for his pomp as an actor, is sort of serial-killer sly in his mannerisms here. He captures Hansen perfectly, with his practically unflinching face and pursed lips. The voice is a straight facsimile of Hansen’s too. Gisondo, as Dan, this deadbeat actor transforming himself into, as his best friend puts it, “a nubile and hairless” pedophile’s wet dream, gets the most engaging arc. All he wants is to be in musicals (we get two renditions of “Seasons of Love”), but instead his big break comes in the form of these morally knotty, dangerous confrontations with bad people. But he’s good at it, Hansen says, and sometimes that praise and a paycheck means more than slumming it in community theater.
It’s a film that asks a handful of severe, somewhat terrifying questions: Is this good work? Is this noble work? And who is responsible for a dead suspected pedophile? To Catch a Predator was designed to transform hunting sex predators into a spectator sport. Is shaming someone publicly the best way to stop someone’s evil and dangerous compulsions?
“There used to be a pillory in every civilized town,” Pattinson’s Hansen says in the film. “Now, there’s a television in every home, and I’m on it.”
