Primetime brings the sleaze, and it’s almost enough

There’s not gonna be title cards.

That’s what occurs to you only a few minutes into the new film Primetime, a proudly scuzzy movie about an immensely scuzzy subject: the rise of the NBC series To Catch a Predator, wherein television producers worked with local law enforcement to entice potential child abusers before a camera crew and immediately arrest them.

You can tell from the jump that Primetime will dispense with any pretense to objectivity. You know right away that it’s not gonna be the kind of docudrama that will conclude with a series of title cards laying out the ultimate fates of its various principals in a sober, impassive, newsy voice.

That’s because the film’s approach is to yeet us straight into the slick, oozy slime of the story it’s telling and make us swim. It sets out to present its lurid, dark, highly emotional and complicated subject in a lurid, dark and highly emotional manner. Yet the film itself is a good deal less complicated than it seems to think it is, and perhaps needs to be, given the stakes involved.

Primetime doesn’t aim for docudrama; it aspires instead to documelodrama. Which is, let’s stipulate, a weird goal, but you can’t say it doesn’t achieve exactly, and only, that.

The filmmakers looked at a timeline of actual events that took place during the run of the To Catch a Predator series, which premiered on Dateline NBC in 2004, swiftly became a cultural phenomenon, and was canceled in 2008 after one subject of the sting operation killed himself.

(The makers of the excellent documentary Predators examined this same timeline, and made a film that’s just as layered, clear-eyed and challenging as Primetime isn’t.)

Primetime’s creators — screenwriter Ajon Singh and director Lance Oppenheim — reviewed that series of unfortunate events and asked themselves, “Where can we imagine/inject/wholly invent some drama — some juicy emotional conflict that will feel like it could have happened?”

The film isn’t particularly interested in anything so mundane as the facts, and it does everything it can to convince us that we shouldn’t be, either.

How else to explain the storyline of Dan (Skyler Gisondo), a dim-bulb wannabe actor who signs on as one of Predator’s decoys? Gisondo evinces a slack-jawed guilelessness so comically extreme that we can’t help but see Dan — an adult tasked to portray a 13-year-old boy — as an intellectual child himself. Which is maybe the point?

How else to explain the half-hearted insertion of a plot thread depicting To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen’s troubled family life? And the hiring of Anna Faris to portray Hansen’s wife Mary, only to allot her so little to do and so little screentime to do it?

How else to explain … whatever the hell it is Robert Pattinson is doing, as Hansen?

Don’t get me wrong: Pattinson is clearly having a ball, and it’s hard not to get swept up in the wake of his every big, weird choice. There’s no denying he’s found a clear take on the character; at one point, Hansen pompously and dismissively informs Gisondo’s character, “Nothing I do is acting, Dan.”

The point Hansen is trying to make, in that moment, is that his only aims are Justice, Integrity and Journalistic Truth. But the point that Pattinson makes, in every frame of the film, is that Hansen is an empty shell whose every move is considered, self-conscious, performative: Acting.

Pattinson’s Hansen is ceaselessly, hungrily aware, reactive, always reading the room with such a lizardlike intensity you half-expect to glimpse nictitating membranes every time he blinks.

And in a film teeming with bold actorly choices, the great Merritt Wever comes to party as Predator’s producer Andie. She pitches her voice up and lends her dialogue a cloying, sing-song cadence that is mystifying at first — until the scene where she abandons it completely while speaking to a colleague from another network whom she actually respects. That’s when it clicks: Andie asserts her authority by treating Hansen, Dan and the rest of the Predator crew like she’s a kindergarten teacher cajoling them to lie down for nap time.

All of these heedlessly outsize performances and moments of showy directorial flash and filigree amount to so much cinematic handwaving. At one point, for example, Hansen tells Dan a story about his visit to a village in India — and the story proves so transporting it literally transports the surprised young man to the village in question. Moments like that seem engineered to distract us from the dark undercurrents roiling beneath the film’s shiny, oil-slick surface.

That dogged refusal to engage with any deeper questions raised by its story likely explains why Primetime adopts such a simplistic, lowest-common-denominator approach to characterization. Everybody in the film wants just one thing, and in pursuing it, they blind themselves to the sick, sad humanity of the world they have chosen to inhabit.

Because the only project of this film is to say: Yes, okay, these predators were bad people, but in the act of chasing them, didn’t the folks at To Catch a Predator become just as bad?

They ask that question, but haven’t really allotted for the answer, which is, of course: Hell, no. Exploiting human misery for ratings may be repellent, but the sexual abuse of minors is evil.

To its credit, the film does half-heartedly feint toward the kind of questions the Predators documentary doggedly drills down on: Would these pathetic men have stayed in their basements, nurturing their sick fantasies in isolation if they hadn’t been encouraged, drawn out, entrapped by the To Catch a Predator team? Would any of them have actually entered those weirdly overlit suburban houses and sat themselves down so sheepishly at those bare kitchen islands?

These questions are raised, but never get the kind of attention they would need to become the subject of the film. Because what the film wants to tackle instead is a simpler, more familiar and much less interesting question: What is the cost of chasing fame? And in dutifully painting Hansen and his colleagues as the real predators, and broadcast news as the lawless jungle they inhabit, Primetime zealously strips away the naggingly complex humanity of everyone involved.

It makes for a juicy story, sure — but juice can’t satisfy hunger, which is maybe why watching Primetime leaves you feeling empty, even hollowed-out. Sleaze has its pleasures, but you can’t make a meal out of it.