Documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim’s first fiction feature Primetime—premiering here at the Venice Film Festival—fills in some background pixels on the show’s rise and fall, focusing particularly on an ambitious, egotistical, and at least somewhat delusional Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson. It’s 2006, and Hansen and his beleaguered producer Andie (Merritt Wever, bringing an edgy nervousness to the role of a woman struggling to stay afloat in the ruthless world of TV news) get a chance to move their show into a primetime slot. The stakes are high, but the potential rewards are great. Hansen’s hubris balloons, and he infects others with his own inflated sense of the public service he claims to be providing. To complete its mission of reeling in the bad guys, the show employs youthful-looking decoys posing as underage kids. One of these is an elflike performer named Del (singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers) who can impersonate either a boy or a girl; she passes some tips along to a nervous newcomer who will come to be known as Decoy Dan (Skyler Gisondo, in a performance laced with touching eagerness). Though he hopes to become a real actor and thinks this is his way in, he wants to quit when he sees how demeaning the gig actually is. But Hansen, with his crocodile smile and purring, almost sultry intonation, persuades him to stick with it, assuring him that he’ll be helping to cleanse the world of evil.
Skyler Gisondo in Primetime —Courtesy of A24
Hansen’s unfolding mania is one of the chief features of Primetime, and Pattinson’s performance is one of the only reasons to see it. As he practices dialogue that he’ll use in the show, drawn from the chatroom fodder that has lured the show’s marks into its trap, he relishes the prurient material a little too much: “I will undress you, you will undress me.” His theatrically precise diction is both disturbing and weirdly alluring.
Still, it’s not exactly clear what Primetime is aiming for: it seems to be making the point that while sexual predators are unequivocally bad, the people who make trash TV—particularly a sordid show that’s masquerading as a means of protecting kids and meting out justice—are also immoral, scheming, and just all-around unpleasant. That’s a shaky equivalence. Oppenheim, director of docs like Spermworld and Some Kind of Heaven, structures the film as if he were shaping a mosaic from disorienting shards; sometimes the scenes feel jaggedly disconnected. He and cinematographer David Bolen have given the picture a grubby, grainy look, including sections that mimic early-2000s-style video recording. If you feel dirty watching it, that’s by design—and if you enjoy feeling dirty, that’s your choice.
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