One might be forgiven, then, for wondering if on some level the real Hansen is delighted to have an honest-to-Gotham Batman play him in a film. The Batman in question is certainly having a ball, with Pattinson getting the big heroic camera dolly closeups that mid-2000s candid camera rigs could never provide. The movie’s To Catch a Predator host practically purrs, “I’m Chris Hansen with Dateline NBC” when he confronts the first predator of the film, with the camera pushing into his face like he just ordered a shaken, and not stirred, martini. This Hansen knows, like the audience 20 years ago did, that we’re not here to watch a predator be apprehended, but a monster be humiliated, groveling to keep this interview from running on national television. Hansen nor the weight of his righteous pose can be bargained with, however, and Pattinson plays him as a guy convinced he is delivering a big goddamn Hollywood movie quote that will one day be cut into a trailer. (If true, mission finally accomplished, Chris.)
But the brilliance of Pattinson’s performance is how otherwise vacant and devoid of humanity it is. At one point in the picture, the character boasts he is not an actor; he’s a journalist. And yet, never once does this man seem genuine or capable of stopping what is obviously performative play-pretend. When left alone in his hotel room, Pattinson’s Hansen still puts on a hell of a show for his mirror, spitting out his mouthwash with the vigor and indignation of Atticus Finch.
In a year full of weirdo, oddball performances by Pattinson, this Hansen might be the oddest and weirdest. He is a guy who is by every definition doing a good deed—getting probable pedophiles off the streets, or at least on law enforcement’s radar—but the eerie uncanny valley he lives in, out of reach of man or beast, not to mention his estranged wife (a cameoing Anna Faris), makes him an enigma. Despite traditional matinee good looks, Pattinson seems to be on a Nicolas Cage-like trajectory of making big, idiosyncratic choices in terms of both roles and the counterintuitive ways he inhabits them. In the case of Hansen, the characterization is akin to a reptile or pod person doing an approximation of what he read heroic humans behave like in a book. It’s all an abstraction.
This is both Primetime’s greatest strength, as well as a kind of ceiling that caps how far the film can really go with its nihilism. When your central character is ultimately an empty vessel of self-aggrandizement, any insights into his inevitable fall will also be somewhat hollow. Oppenheim, a documentarian by training prior to his first narrative film, attempts to circumvent that limitation by building out supporting characters with some semblance of a character arc or self-realization that is impossible for his Hansen. Thus enters Merritt Wever as Hansen’s long-suffering producer Andie Bender and Skyler Gisondo as Dan Plumb, aka Decoy Dan!
Both are well performed, although Gisondo’s young, struggling actor who agrees at the age of 24 to play 13-year-old boys is the only personality in the film offering some counterweight to the hellish darkness. Poor Dan is a musical theater kid who is introduced literally singing “Seasons of Love” from Rent (another ‘90s and early 2000s staple) during his audition. He’s completely unprepared for the “role” he is going up for—and how during his first day on the show’s production, a predator takes off his pants right in front of him with a canister of whipped cream in hand.
Gisondo, who plays Jimmy Olsen in the new Superman movies, provides a flicker of innocence, sure, but he is also a barometer that allows any viewer with some kind of conscience to measure the cynicism of everything around poor Dan, including the film. Wever is excellent as a ceaselessly fatigued Andie, but the producer proves only a few clicks less vampiric than Pattinson’s Hansen, and is depicted as literally choosing the poisoned circus of To Catch a Predator’s production at every opportunity. All the other lackies lack any awareness at all as they claim their show to be righteous activism, even as they gleefully chase “whales” and the most sensationalistic of grotesque marks. How else are they going to compete against Lost at 9pm on Wednesdays?!
