Lance Oppenheim is the acclaimed documentary-maker who has made his feature debut with a strangely overwrought and heavy-footed drama-thriller, which for all its elaborate neon-lit atmosphere of noir danger isn’t at all sure what it wants to say about media or morality, or anything else.
The subject is the controversial top-rated US TV reality show To Catch a Predator which ran from 2004 to 2008; that title was evidently taken from the Hitchcock movie To Catch a Thief, which in turn was inspired by the phrase “Set a thief to catch a thief”. In search of prey, the show’s researchers baited paedophiles in online chatrooms posing as children, lured them to “sting houses” where actors played underage teens on the front porch to get the abusers inside, where they can be clearly filmed expressing criminal intentions. But before anything could happen, sonorous host Chris Hansen appeared from nowhere and confronted these cringing abusers – which made for fantastic television. After this the cops made an arrest, and they and the state prosecutor did the heavy lifting of overseeing due process and presumably debating the merits of entrapment in court, although this obvious issue is not raised in the movie.
Robert Pattinson certainly looks and sounds good in the role of the preening, pompous Hansen, gleefully overexcited when his show is promoted to a primetime slot, solemnly congratulating himself on cleaning up America and relishing the bizarrely melodramatic moment each week when he gets in the astonished abuser’s face, sauntering down the stairs with the insouciance of a talk show host. “Big night planned?” Merritt Wever plays Andie Bender, a hardbitten (fictional-composite) female executive in charge of Hansen’s live-ammo theatrics – Bender’s persona inherited from Faye Dunaway in Network – and Skyler Gisondo plays a needy, baby-faced wannabe actor Dan Plumb (another fictional-composite) who is the jailbait decoy that gets to lure the paedo indoors. He is persuaded to take the job by Hansen flatteringly taking him out for a drink, a scene slyly placed before us as a quasi-grooming episode.
Plumb worries that this will not help his acting career long term and of course effectively invites the audience to worry that this is all just playacting anyway, all bread-and-circuses exploitation. The tension ratchets up when everyone realises they have to do something extra to maintain ratings; Hansen becomes obsessed with the rumour that there is a “whale” to be brought to justice in a righteous Texan small town – a high-ranking public figure, not just another sweaty nobody.
But the movie’s own actual drama appears to reside in the backstairs office politics and gossip. Hansen is trying and failing to break off an extra-marital affair and Bender is being headhunted by a rival network prepared to offer huge bucks so she will produce a copycat version of Hansen’s show and crush it and him in the ratings. For a while, some intriguing conspiratorial possibilities present themselves. But none of that leads anywhere. Really we are just heading to the gruesome denouement which surely had to happen if paedophiles were hunted and shamed for sport; the film coasts up to a crisis, after which the drama is deemed to be at an end, although how or if Hansen has changed or conceded or learned anything is a mystery. It’s a disappointment.
• Primetime screened at the Venice film festival; it is out in the US on 25 September and in the UK on 30 October.
