Lance Oppenheim, the documentary filmmaker behind Some
Kind of Heaven also currently trending for his upcoming Elizabeth Holmes
documentary You Can See Everything co-directed with Nathan Fielder, made
his fictional narrative feature film debut last week with the controversial yet
hot A24 ticket Primetime. A
psychological thriller as dramatization of the nonfiction reality television
series To Catch a Predator with series host and producer Chris Hansen played
by Robert Pattinson in his most snakelike role since Cosmopolis, before
the film even aired in cinemas it was already mired in conflict with its
real-life subject Chris Hansen who refused a nondisclosure agreement and has
since threatened legal action against A24 and/or the filmmakers.
The kind of film supporters and detractors
from both sides have already made up their minds on, Lance Oppenheim’s ethereal
and gritty, almost abrasive drama is a confrontational, frequently
expressionistic and grainy meditation on the gulf between activism, vigilante justice,
journalistic integrity and exploitation without giving any easy straight-laced
answers.
Meanwhile
the National Enquirer is busily digging up whatever dirt they can to smear
Chris Hansen’s reputation as Dan Plum starts getting cold feet about his role
in the sting operations. Eventually as
the show continues to gain momentum, an anonymous tip arises someone in a position
of power within the walls of the United States government might be a pedophile
as Hansen, Plum and crew prepare to take on potentially their biggest target
yet with unforeseen tragic consequences.
A hallucinatory, hyperkinetic and rapidly edited confrontational
sensory freakout from its 1.50:1 grain heavy cinematography by David Bolen,
framed in effectively the same aspect ratio as the newly revived film format
VistaVision with a foreboding ambient, sometimes atonal score by Ari Balouzian,
Primetime from a purely technical end sands wherever you stand on the
subject is prime filmmaking material of the highest order. From haunted, almost reptilian scenes of
Robert Pattinson’s face filling the camera in tight encroaching closeups to his
own murky moral compass exuded by Pattinson’s moody and increasingly erratic
performance, it presents the actor as somehow more bloodlessly vampiric than
his stint in the Twilight films.
With eyes and an angry brow that express the same degree of predatory
danger Malcolm McDowell’s infamous A Clockwork Orange gaze does, it goes
without saying Pattinson is our generation’s best living young screen villain. Skyler Gisondo is a fantastic actor in many
shows and films already and his turn here in playing a boyish young-looking and
sounding victim will send chills down your spine. Merritt Wever is also excellent as Hansen’s
equally mercenary producer who must keep the reeling and unpredictable Hansen
from going off the rails.
Currently in theatrical release where it reportedly is
breaking box office records for A24 considering the following of its leading
actor fresh off of The Odyssey while also being on the heels of Lance Oppenheim’s
hot ticket documentary You Can See Everything, Primetime much
like A24’s Zola is a borderline psychedelic true-crime drama of sorts
bathed in kaleidoscopic colors and richly filmic cinematography which doesn’t
provide any final word on its subject so much as it tries to get a conversation
going about him.
Without taking sides,
we find ourselves caught in the throes of a televised witch hunt with Hansen as
its torchbearer. Closest perhaps to David
Fincher’s The Social Network with a hallucinatory style mixed with
chilly formalism and lead by again the best young serpent crawling and
slithering his way through modern cinema, Primetime won’t be for
everyone but on its terms functions as a compelling drama and deconstruction of
the morally righteous media machine and how even an act of good will can be
exploitative and dangerous.
--Andrew Kotwicki