Venice: "Primetime" by Lance Oppenheim

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice

“What story was Oppenheim trying to tell with this movie?” a colleague asked me right after we left the screening of Primetime. He sounded as baffled as I felt. Since we're both European, neither of us is particularly familiar with Chris Hansen’s persona, voice, or mannerisms. As journalists, however, we know enough about his notorious pursuit of ratings on American TV and the backlash surrounding his early-2000s show. Still, for days, when someone asked what I thought of Primetime, I found myself giving the rarest of answers: “I don’t know yet.” It took me a lot of thinking to unpack why, in the end, it did not work for me...

What I did know was that Oppenheim had hardly shied away from strong formal choices. He shoots almost the entire movie in a boxy 1.50:1 aspect ratio, slightly wider than conventional 4:3, filling the frame with Robert Pattinson’s trembling facial features, pushing his character’s grotesquerie uncomfortably close to the audience. The scenes are bathed in an inescapable grainy blue, while superb sound editing mixes television static with distorted, distant noises. That forceful visual identity is matched by the boldness of Ajon Singh’s screenplay, only his second feature credit. Primetime begins in medias res, providing virtually no background on Hansen, the birth of his controversial show, his moral outlook, or his relationship with his uncanny producer Andie (Merritt Wever). The facts are taken for granted. Oppenheim is interested in their interpretation, specifically in the moment Hansen is invited into the big leagues, the primetime of the title. NBC chief Jeff Zucker, played by Zucker himself, initially despises the program before acknowledging that, for some inexplicable reason, America loves it. Hansen therefore gets his shot at television’s great white whale of the era: "Lost". To compete, he needs bigger, bolder, more repulsive predators to put in the stocks on national television, “a modern pillory for civilized America,” as Hansen explains to a young actor recruited as the new decoy. That actor is played by Skyler Gisondo, the film’s revelation, who manages to steal scenes even from Pattinson.

We follow Hansen as he pursues a particularly promising predator online while simultaneously being pursued by the press over his affair with a thirtysomething blonde woman. As he dreams of beating Lost, his grotesque little world, built around an already paper-thin claim to moral righteousness, begins to collapse. The problem is that the disintegration of Hansen’s professional life becomes virtually indistinguishable from the disintegration of the movie itself.Primetimeis held together by a terrific cast, but even there its internal contradictions show. Pattinson’s aggressively grotesque, intensely physical performance clashes with the more muted naturalism of Gisondo and Wever. I am sure I will be in the minority here, but Pattinson is simply too much: jaw tightening, lips twitching almost serpent-like, every tic amplified by a camera obsessively trained on his face. Perhaps the performance itself is not entirely to blame. Oppenheim wants us to understand immediately that Hansen sees himself as a savior while behaving increasingly like a monste. Unfortunately, we do understand it immediately: ten minutes are enough. Everything afterward merely reiterates this same idea.

Which brings me back to my colleague’s question: what exactly is Oppenheim trying to say? Primetime is deliberately uninterested in giving viewers unfamiliar with Hansen enough context to form an informed opinion, but it has surprisingly little insight to offer in exchange. Like "To Catch a Predator" itself, it quickly becomes repetitive: predators are terrible people who prey on children. Once one encounter has been shown, the entire mechanism is laid bare. As an anchorman and a human being, Hansen receives essentially the same treatment. His performative techniques, plain manipulations of reality, and never ending deceptions toward his family are early established and endlessly restaged. What remains after Hansen's portrayal is a formally bold but ultimately mild indictment of the cruel voyeurism of early-2000s television, accompanied by the growing suspicion that Oppenheim simply enjoys how grotesque Hansen is. The movie is too sparsely contextualized to be informative and too reluctant to take a moral position to become genuinely provocative. Instead, it often feels like a deep dive into the sinister, grainy world of 2000s television primarily for the vibe of it. It’s a bold premise yielding a surprisingly thin result, and perhaps an emblematic byproduct of what A24 has become as a production company.

That absence of a moral position becomes particularly troubling when it reveals itself to be only apparent. I was genuinely disturbed by how Primetime eventually places predators attempting to have sex with underage teens and Hansen having an affair with a thirty-year-old woman on something resembling the same moral continuum. When his producer Andie asks him, “Do you really think her being thirty years old makes it less bad?”, it gave me chills. Of course it makes it less bad, Andie. Adultery may be reprehensible, but an affair between adults is not a crime and not even remotely on the same moral scale as sexually exploiting a minor. This chilling scene is where Singh’s writing and Oppenheim’s lack of control become most apparent. The pair seem to believe that avoinding any moral commentary is inherently a daring move an uncanny movie like Primetime. It can be for sure, provided that those behind the camera and the script are able to clearly understand the consequences of that choice, allowing the consequences to been shown onscreen. Here, however, every moral dilemma produces only a confused response. As the only female in the room with any kind of power, Andie perpetually oscillates between leaving Hansen behind (advancing her career elsewhere) and becoming the more ruthless member of their duo. There is not enough history or perspective for this personal contradiction to acquire genuine meaning.

Another revealing example of the movie’s wasted potential comes when Primetime suddenly connects its subject to something someone my age could immediately connect with. An NBC executive calls Hansen and tells him to turn on ABC. There are polar bears on "Lost". For those who were there, even outside America, the reference is unmissable: "Lost" threw something as absurd as a polar bear into its story to keep audiences in front of the screen, sending millions of viewers online for weeks trying to “solve the mystery.” Hansen therefore has to find his own polar bears in real-life crimes, cherry-picking increasingly sensational predators to keep viewers watching. There is something genuinely extraordinary hiding in that idea. Instead, Primetime wanders into an absurd farce involving Texas police escalating an operation with guns, enormous trucks and an army of officers to catch a single man.

The more revealing story remains in the faces of the decoys: two young actors hired to perform a role that turns into a collection of scarring experiences. From watching a predator put whipped cream on his penis almost immediately after saying hello to unexpectedly feeling empathy for a man being chased like a hunted fox. There is something profoundly unsettling, for both the decoy and the audience, about finding yourself feeling sorry for the predator. Primetime recognizes that discomfort but takes it nowhere, because it simultaneously asks us to sympathize with the decoy, with Hansen and seemingly with everyone else involved.

Oppenheim approaches extraordinarily delicate material hoping that his formal audacity and an abrasive edge will provide the movie with the substance it otherwise lacks. In doing so, Primetime comes dangerously close to making the same mistake as the man it presents as a cautionary tale: mistaking the ability to keep us watching for having something worthwhile to say.

Previously at Venice

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Comments

[Mr Ripley79]

I have no idea who the person he's portraying is cos i'm not a TV junkie but I also have no idea who ever thought Pattinson was a good actor or even a compelling or watchable screen presence.