Like Tom Holland, Zendaya and Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson is having one helluva year. The Drama was well-received, The Odyssey has made $1.7 billion and is the Oscar front-runner, and the anticipation for Dune: Part Three is off-the-charts. But until Dunesday arrives, we have Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s narrative feature debut, diving deep into the phenomenon that was NBC’s To Catch A Predator. Visually mesmerizing and thematically eerie, Primetime is a fascinating and wacky character study of Hansen’s spiraling descent into madness and encapsulation of 2000s politics and pop culture.
The story is based on Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire magazine article titled Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die, with the acknowledgement in the credits disclaiming: “based on true events, but creative license was taken.” Chris Hansen has publicly bashed the film as “identity theft” and “exploitative.” I can’t speak to who the real Chris Hansen is, I can only speak to the performance I saw on screen. And what Robert Pattinson did with this character, cinematically, was simply remarkable.
His voice was impeccably altered to an uncanny resemblance. The iconic line: “you see how this looks, right?” became an instant viral meme when the trailer dropped a couple months ago. But beyond the impressive physical traits, it’s the psychological frenzy he exhibits that stayed with me. We see a man in real-time juggle skyrocketing fame, family abandonment, past regrets, and a sociopathic quest to “rid the world of evil.” There’s some shocking and quite hilarious outbursts of a man who is cleary gripped by a fever dream and no one can deliver such uniquely charismatic chaos as Robert Pattinson.
The film’s visual palette is striking. Oppenheim takes a page out of Steven Soderbergh’s book with each frame being laced with a glowing gloss of light that makes every cut screenshot-worthy. This frenetic and oversaturated aesthetic complements the “fever dream” narrative mayhem very well. I was beyond impressed with Oppenheim’s approach to shot direction and now eagerly await his next A24 documentary film with Nathan Fielder about Elizabeth Holmes, You Can See Everything. And as someone who was in high school/college during this time, vividly remembering seeing constant news coverage of the Iraq war, with this aesthetic, it felt like I was, myself, in a fever dream of an early 2000s nostalgia funhouse mirror.
As for downsides, per the picture above, I find it beyond gross that they actually had Jeff Zucker play himself. Of course, the real-life NBC TV boss plays a demanding asshole broadcast executive quite well, but of all individual humans on Earth responsible for enabling and platforming Donald Trump, few did more than Jeff Zucker. The dude who signed off on The Apprentice and colluded with Trump behind-the-scenes during the 2016 campaign from a media exposure standpoint. In this era of heartless billionaires who control everything, it’s not an apt, fun or subversive cameo. It’s a middle finger to all of us, from Jeff on the screen, saying: “yeah I enabled the guy in the Epstein files and now I’m in a movie about To Catch a Predator, what are you gonna do about it?” Next time, Lance, choose an actor to portray the powers that be, just like you cast Pattinson to play Hansen.
The transition between the second and third act looses some momentum that had kept me thoroughly engaged, but overall, Primetime is a beautifully shot, darkly funny, and wildly entertaining exposé on American culture obsessions.
