Primetime review – Robert Pattinson is Oscar-worthy in a film too smart and grimy for awards glory - The Independent
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Months before Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s grimy and propulsive film about the NBC paedophile-hunter series To Catch a Predator, arrived in cinemas, the internet had already stripped its trailers for parts. Robert Pattinson’s multifariously uncanny impression of TV host Chris Hansen had been plucked and reconfigured into a raft of frivolous memes. “You see how this looks, right,” he coos, smug and sinister, to a prospective child sex offender, in a clip that, if you’re anything like me, you’ll have encountered dozens of times before seeing it in context.
Overcoming this sort of memeification is no small feat, but Primetime, to its credit, leaves scant time to be glib. The story begins in the thick of things, with To Catch a Predator already a well-oiled – if flagrantly unethical – machine. Hansen and his shrewd, long-suffering and morally complicit producer Andie (Merritt Wever) are told that their hit programme is being moved to a bigger slot; it’s going up against Lost, one of the biggest shows at rival network ABC. With the promotion comes pressure – an implicit directive to get a bigger scoop, to get more of the most salacious and scandalous footage possible, no matter the cost.
Anyone who kept up with the news around the time of To Catch a Predator’s airing (2004 to 2007), or who watched last year’s sobering documentary Predators, will know how this story ends. As such, there is never much tension here, as Primetime instead becomes more of a character piece. Hansen is captivating and unredeemed, a scheming, charismatic and insincere figure trying to stop both his personal and professional lives imploding.
Nearly as much screentime is devoted to Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), a budding musical theatre geek hired by Hansen and co to play one of the “decoys” – adult actors who pose as children, effectively human bait. Gisondo plays it brilliantly, seduced by Hansen and the promise of this strange half-fame, even as the moral contradictions of the job become harder to ignore. Primetime’s story is insular, but there is a wealth of ideas; the central concerns here, paedophilia and predation, are handled with an intelligent, confounding sparseness.
The timing of Primetime’s release, with awards season lurking indiscreetly around the corner, has invited plenty of speculation as to Pattinson’s awards chances. Make no mistake: this is one of the year’s very best acting performances. But a typical Oscar-ready biopic part this is not. His wilder swings in this film have encouraged comparisons to Nicolas Cage – either high praise or a profound neg, depending on your Cage mileage – and there are many points where Pattinson seems to lurch out of naturalism and into something more bizarre. But for all his grandiose deliveries, crooked smirks and able mimicry, Pattinson’s biggest asset here is precision. There is a line towards the end – his delivery of the word “showtime” – that is underplayed with such incredible, difficult exactness. It is the kind of control that very few actors ever manage to master.
More than anything, it’s the casting that most deserves awards recognition here; everyone is performing at the top level, from Gisondo, to Wever, to the musician Phoebe Bridgers, who makes a shockingly assured acting debut as another one of the “decoys”. Primetime is a film where every part seems to cohere absolutely, from the tar-black comedy of Ajon Singh’s screenplay to the giddy, immersive soundtrack by Ari Balouzian. If some films take you on a walk through a tunnel, then this one is a jump into a hole – the only question is how deep it gets before you hit the bottom.
Dir: Lance Oppenheim. Starring: Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Matthew Maher, Phoebe Bridgers, Bokeem Woodbine, Alex Winter, Anna Faris. 15, 110 mins.
