Here is the first of two talking-point movies headed our way from the filmmaker Lance Oppenheim. In a few weeks, we'll finally get to see Oppenheim's much-heralded doc You Can See Everything, in which the director and Nathan Fielder apply a pincer movement to the household of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. All-American sociopathy - ultra-mediated sociopathy - similarly sits at the heart of Primetime, a dramatised study of the tarnished journalist Chris Hansen, best known as the polished host of NBC's post-millennial reality-TV ratings grabber To Catch a Predator. To my knowledge, that show never aired on UK TV, where a different set of standards and practices applied, and thus it never had to be pulled from the schedules, as it was in America, after one of the show's more illustrious targets killed himself on camera. Some of the context and backstory was covered in last year's documentary Predators, with its suggestively pluralised title; Oppenheim, for his part, commits to exploring the show's more performative aspects. Predator's (actually not un-Fielder-like) set-up involved hired actors luring actual and potential sex offenders to a given location and then exposing the latter - sometimes literally - at the heart of primetime before they were carted off by waiting cops; the designer suited, carefully coiffed Hansen (played here by Robert Pattinson) assumed the multiple roles of presenter, producer, judge, jury and (in the end) executioner. As a premise for an hour-long television show building on the success of Cops and priming viewers for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, it has a ghoulishly obvious appeal, yet what Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh are interested in is how this iron horse of the NBC evening schedules went dramatically off the rails, if ever it had guidelines to begin with.
Much like the recent streaming docs The Swan: Behind the Mirror and Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model, Primetime may be most interesting as part of a process whereby consumers of old media grow up and begin questioning what on earth they were being raised on. As a feature, it's really doing no more than heavily underlining what some of us saw in reality TV from the off: that its cheap salaciousness made it irresistible for executives and thus deadly for scripted drama and comedy, that its default position was making dupes, fools and monsters of ordinary people. (These shows seemed like the fall of Western civilisation even before they gave a platform to Donald Trump and Andrew Tate.) Singh's critique, granted, extends along multiple lines: that To Catch a Predator was haphazardly produced, forever skimping on care provision while chasing its next victims ("we shoot the rehearsal"); that it, too, lured in and jeopardised innocents (represented here by Skyler Gisondo as a jobbing actor hired to pose as a fresh-faced child); that it fed into the conspiratorial thinking behind, say, Pizzagate; and that Hansen was less the saint and saviour he presented himself as than a toxic combination of male ego and white knight syndrome. (Pattinson, adding another strange little guy to his showreel, makes the character slick to the point of being actively slippery: even off the clock, pursuing an extramarital affair on his travels, he resembles the grubbiest imaginable idea of a vigilante, a Bruce Wayne who's strayed badly off-course.) Cinematically, we're back in the territory of 2014's Nightcrawler, although Oppenheim - who first broke through with the heavily stylised doc Some Kind of Heaven - pushes his image even further: unnerving full-face close-ups catching every last bead of flop sweat, everything and everyone lit like the cover of a lurid Fifties paperback. The encounter sequences are shot and cut in a way that makes Primetime something of a generational landmark, as the first A24 film to have been visibly influenced by the work of Paul Thomas Anderson: no conventional exposition, a steady flow of images, allowing the viewer to feel their way into this milieu, in as much as we want to get close to anybody here.
And that, finally, is Primetime's big problem: editorially, the movie is both judgier and doomier than Anderson, flipping the exploitation of a Boogie Nights on its belly and bearing witness only to the damage and harm caused by this particular media circus. (Oddly, Primetime retains something of Anderson's interest in warped, makeshift family units: Hansen is framed as an absent and wayward father, Merritt Wever's pill-popping producer Abby Bender a stressy mother, Gisondo as the Wahlberg-like kid who needs protection. At one point, the latter can even be seen tossing a baseball around with Hansen.) There may now be no other way of approaching To Catch a Predator, yet as a film, Primetime lacks any thrilling wildness. Singh is telling a small and squalid story, mostly played out in chatrooms, motels and kitchens; the behaviour Oppenheim's camera is left to document constitutes nobody's finest hour exactly. It does feel a limitation that this particular flow of images was instigated by gutter journalism: in the absence of having anywhere new or unexpected to go, the movie mostly leaves us circling the plughole, along with some especially grimy backwash. (You may well come away feeling an urgent need for a warm shower.) The closing scenes, granted, gain a welcome kick of comic energy from Bokeem Woodbine as the gung-ho, good-ol'-boy sheriff who helped precipitate the final mise en abîme ("paedos are not allowed in Texas"), but there's simply not all that much one can take away from this sordid affair, save that the ethics of the Bush II era were questionable in the extreme (duh), and that those who shout the loudest about Protecting Our Children are often those from whom we have most to fear. You can see everything with hindsight, it transpires, but it doesn't always make for the most edifying spectacle.
Primetime is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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