Lance Oppenheim’s film, chronicling the rise and fall of NBC News host Chris Hansen and his “Predator” empire in the early 2000’s, is all about distortion, visually represented in a myriad of ways. From the opening shot, an extreme, highly pixelated closeup of Hansen’s mouth rehearsing the gotcha lines he plans to use on his latest perp/victim, to the grimy, blown out film stock chosen by DP and longtime Oppenheim collaborator David Bolen, which renders everything on screen an ugly, high contrast miasma, with murky shadows and an absence of midgrade tone, it is almost perversely ugly.
This visual degradation extends thematically to the actions of its capitalizing protagonists, who produce what they hope will be a ratings bonanza built on the tabloid frenzy of capturing dangerous, desperate people making choices that will shatter the rest of their lives.
The film begins in mid-swing, with Hansen (Robert Pattinson, at his most unsettlingly remote) and his producers, Andie Bender (Merritt Weaver), and Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher) already reaping the rotted fruit of their success with the NBC bigwigs. Hansen’s shtick, where he uses Xavier’s online skills to entice would-be pedophiles for meet-ups, along with actor decoys presenting themselves as willing underage partners, only to interrupt the proceedings with solemn incredulity (“What are you doing here?”), leaving the perps writhing under the glare of his condemnation, catches the early-internet zeitgeist of putting complete strangers on public full-blast.
When Hansen catches word from the network that they want to bust out his “Dateline” segment and turn it into a stand-alone show for their primetime slate, he has reason to believe he’s finally made it to the big time, damn the cost.
By contrast, one of his newest decoys — a 23-year-old Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), an aspiring actor — has just begun his journey of what he hopes will be a fruitful career. Picked for his youthful looks (as a decoy, he needs to be able to credibly pass for anywhere from 13-16), Dan is overjoyed to be put up in a motel (“They have towels!” he squeals to his friend on the phone) without even knowing what the part is he’ll be playing. He connects with the female decoy, Del (Phoebe Bridgers), more of a cagey veteran on this circuit, after he comes to realize just what he’s been hired to do.
As happy as Hansen may be at the promotion, the rest of his existence is still a mess: His work/life balance is totally out of whack, in one scene he wakes up his two young boys in the middle of the night in order to have them watch a recent episode of his work (“That’s cool,” his youngest says, barely awake). His wife (Anna Farris) seems unhappy with him, and, it turns out, for good reason, as the self-appointed Judge of Human Frailty has himself been carrying on an extramarital affair, a fact picked up on by the National Enquirer, who threaten him with going national unless he gives them a comment.
If that weren’t enough, the new, much more prominent placement of his show is also causing him stress, with the network bigwigs extolling him to go bigger, and badder, prowling for ratings spikes. This leads Hansen to push his staff harder, eventually leading to Xavier making contact with a potential predator who he has reasons to believe holds a position of significant power in the Texas district where he’s located. This “whale,” as Hansen dubs him, becomes ever more important to the newscaster as the rest of his life continues to unravel.
Against the wishes of producer Andie, who wants the show to follow its production schedule on the Jersey Shore, Hansen pushes the team to Texas, where he’s convinced the solution to all the pressure on his head will release when he catches the “whale,” hoping that the would-be perp’s elevated status will cause a sensation across the nation. It does, but not in the way that Hansen might have imagined.
Oppenheim, a talented documentarian (Some Kind of Heaven, Ren Faire), basing the film on Luke Dittrich’s seminal Esquire article, “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” takes a kind of interpretive tack with Hansen. As portrayed by the ever-twisty Pattinson, the line between his performative self (thrusting out from behind a literal curtain with the professionally grave, self-important sweep of a high-school principal, or maybe a mortician) and his actual self with his wife and kids, gets smudged into a dark smear, leading him deeper into psychosis. At one point, when one of Hansen’s perp-jump scares goes wrong, he lies down in a fetal position and sinks into a fugue state, unable to be reached by the increasingly agitated Andie.
The problem is, in the film’s rendering, Hansen is already so deeply unhinged by the time we meet him, grandiosely intoning his perp cutdowns (“You see how this looks, right?”), his further descent doesn’t particularly resonate. It’s like watching a cooking video which starts with the already constructed casserole being shoved into the oven.
Pattinson plays him without any actual homebase from which to stray — there’s no “there” there in the first place — so the film has the unusual (designed?) effect of making us feel a certain sympathy for his perps, terrified men (as the film mostly portrays them) forced to contemplate the end of their lives in front of a rapacious national audience. It is possible to find their urges reprehensible while still seeing them as deeply damaged human beings in need of rehabilitation rather than greasy fodder for our sanctimonious collective maw (not for nothing does a character stop at a Subway for a sandwich, with a poster of former spokesperson-turned-outed-pedophile Jared beaming out at them).
In keeping with that theme, the film culminates with one of the most notorious cases in “Predator” history, the “whale” (who turns out to be a state DA) being pressed by Hansen and his team too far, but long before that tragedy takes place, Hansen’s hold on reality, and the tenets of his life, have already all but collapsed. The film’s hero, such as there is, turns out to be innocent Dan, the only person involved in the production who seems to have any sense of human empathy.
As an analogue to the Internet generation’s propensity to pile on to any vulnerable-seeming individual, too often a rite of reprehensible passage in the modern era, Oppenheim’s film is quick to lay waste to any sense of moral superiority. The “Predator” PR team may claim they are “cleansing the world of evil,” but in reality, they’re just profiting from it. Hansen, every bit the exploitive predator himself, may make a living sensationalizing humans’ weakest foibles, but nobody comes out of this process the least bit unscathed.
