Final Rating: 4.5/5
“Why don’t you take a seat?”
Robert Pattinson delivers a career-best performance as “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen in Primetime, the narrative feature debut of documentary director Lance Oppenheim.
First airing in 2004, “Predator” began as a segment on “Dateline NBC” in which Hansen confronted and interviewed men caught attempting to solicit sex from minors. The interviews were conducted at the end of lengthy sting operations, in which members of the vigilante group Perverted Justice would pose as young boys or girls in explicit online chatrooms, attempting to lure potential perverts to an empty house NBC had leased for the show.
Primetime opens with a man entering the house, shot from a half dozen angles via hidden cameras. He sits down, helping himself to cookies offered to him by a girl he believes to be thirteen. The girl, one of NBC’s decoys, disappears to another room to grab something, and from the second floor, Hansen emerges. “Big night planned,” Hansen says, and the man goes pale, words catching in his throat as he realizes that at this moment, his life is over.
As he’s being pressed to the floor and cuffed by a policeman, he asks Hansen if he’ll get the electric chair. Hansen replies that no content decisions have been made yet, but that he’s been filming this for TV.
Later, a fan of the show tells Hansen that, in his position, he’d kill the people his show catches. Hansen mulls it over, then smiles and responds, “what I do is probably worse.”
With Primetime, Oppenheim interrogates the grotesque spectacle of “Predator.” Through Hansen and his show, the audience is confronted with law enforcement as entertainment; the dismantling of people’s lives as a ratings juggernaut.
Hansen is portrayed as a burnt-out cynic, nominally catching predators but totally unconcerned with their guilt. Instead, he’s chasing “the whale,” a hypothetical child predator with systemic power who, if caught, would launch Hansen into superstardom. Like Ahab, if Hansen could only kill “the whale,” his life’s purpose would be complete. He could achieve his greatest dream: getting higher Nielsen ratings than ABC’s “Lost.”
Indeed, Hansen’s main enemies in Primetime aren’t the predators themselves. Nor are his enemies law enforcement, studio executives, or even a rival producer trying to poach his idea for ABC. Hansen’s primary competition is “Lost,” a major network series in the same timeslot, and the Iraq War, coverage of which makes up most of the non-“Predator” parts of “Dateline.”
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan permeate the world Hansen inhabits. Combat footage flashes in the background between scenes of Hansen setting up stings. The final operation – the one to catch “the whale” – opens on a shot of a framed picture of Osama Bin Laden. A zoom out reveals a SWAT team gearing up, evoking the image of SEAL Team 6 a few years later. The famous video of Saddam Hussein’s statue being toppled is used to introduce Hansen’s main rival, “Dateline” correspondent Stone Phillips.
On the one hand, contrasting war in the Middle East with “Predator” makes the latter seem small by comparison. Phillips scoffs at Hansen’s small-time true-crime reporting in a world where troops are dying to protect Americans’ freedoms. And yet, Primetime allows a more damning read on “Dateline”: it’s not Oppenheim that gives equal attention to these two stories, it’s NBC. Hansen turns child sexual assault into entertainment, while Phillips does the same for war.
Primetime’s theme of blurring the line between real-life and entertainment is reflected in almost every filmmaking decision. The film features a significant amount of footage shot with security cameras and presented in split-screen, mirroring the real show. To break up the facsimile, cinematographer David Bolen’s will cut to with extreme, garishly lit close-ups, essentially splicing an emotionally charged fiction into a bone-dry representation of fact.
The film’s cast adds further metatext, using a mixture of actors and non-actors to provoke questions on an entertainment industry that exploits truth for ratings. Then-head of programming at NBCUniversal Jeff Zucker plays a fictionalized version of himself. Former child actor Jonathan Lipnicki appears as a child predator. Documentary filmmaker Alex Winter (also known for portraying Bill in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure) appears as Bill Conradt, Hansen’s “whale.”
At the centre of everything is Hansen himself. Pattinson elegantly slips into the role. The way he speaks, the way he walks, his intonation of words would make him a dead ringer for the real deal. He adopts Hansen’s charisma to embody a fun TV host with catchphrases who is recognized everywhere he goes.
In his private moments, however, he seems uncomfortable in his own skin. He spends hours alone repeating the most shocking chat logs to himself. Around others, he has difficulty connecting: his only interest is his divine purpose. Hunting predators is a way to go after an ancient evil that preys on children. Or at least, that’s what he tells himself as he preys on camera-friendly men in pursuit of ratings at all costs.
Acting as something of a counterpoint to Hansen is Skyler Gisondo as Dan Plum, an actor employed by NBC to act as a decoy for predators. Plum begins as a plucky entertainer excited to appear on television in hopes of getting his SAG card, only to quickly find himself in a world of true crime instead.
In increasingly uncomfortable scenes, he begins to mirror Hansen, repeating lines over and over to sound more convincing as a thirteen-year-old boy and adopting Hansen’s divine calling. In his most memorable scene, Plum fills in for Hansen when the latter fails to show up to a sting, resulting in a jaw-dropping sequence in which Gisondo gives a pitch-perfect impression of Pattinson giving an impression of Hansen.
Primetime is based on the Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline, This Man Will Die” by Luke Dittrich. Dittrich’s article is a fascinating read, detailing the astounding levels of police misconduct and network indifference required for “Predator” to end up where it ultimately would before being cancelled.
Oppenheim adds an emotional dimension. He’s not concerned with the guilt or innocence of the show’s victims – see David Osit’s Peabody-nominated documentary Predators for that – but rather the moral rot of turning abuse into spectacle. Dittrich’s article ends with a producer walking up to a cameraman, both ignorant of a suicide which has just occurred only a few feet away, and saying “are we having fun?”
Primetime ends on a version of the same events. Only this time, the producer is aware of the suicide and instead says “I think I can work with this.”
Thank you to Elevation Pictures for the screening.
