When Skyler Gisondo turns up in Primetime as "Decoy Dan" Plum — an aspiring 23-year-old actor cast to play teenage bait for an unsuspecting predator — the camera cannot take its eyes off him. [1] That is the Los Angeles Times' way into its verdict: "Primetime" and Chris Hansen deserve each other, film and subject locked in mutual myth-making. [1] Vanity Fair goes further: Pattinson's go-for-broke Hansen is a showstopper, and Lance Oppenheim's intense picture bowled over the Venice festival. [2] Saturday's premiere apparatus — photocall, panel, memes — has its verdicts. Raves, both of them, filed while the portrayed man stayed home.
Pattinson has now answered the criticism, with the legal threat sitting in the question row. Asked at Saturday's press conference about Hansen's comments and the possibility of action, the actor said he hopes Hansen likes the movie. [3] Hope, again, for an outcome requiring a screening that has not happened on acceptable terms. The response is gracious and structurally empty — the exact register of a press tour meeting a legal file.
The two reviews agree on the mechanism and differ on the meaning, which is what makes them a pair. The Times sees a film about performance that performs — Gisondo's decoy stealing focus inside a movie about staged confrontations — and finds the subject and the treatment made for each other. [1] Vanity Fair sees a star turn so committed it flattens the distinction: Pattinson does not play Hansen so much as detonate him, and the festival detonated back. [2] Coronation by craft in one; coronation by collision in the other. Neither review disputes that the engine is Hansen's persona. They dispute only whether the film borrows it or becomes it.
Hansen's dissent is the third review, unpublished and unanswerable in the trades' terms. The man calls the production sneaky and disingenuous, weighs action, and has not watched the work under review. [3][4] A critic can answer a performance. Nobody can answer an objection to existing — and the film's triumph, if the notices hold through awards season, will be a triumph permanently annotated by its subject's refusal. Acclaim and objection as simultaneous facts: the film works as cinema precisely where Hansen says it fails as account. precisely where Hansen says it fails as account. Saturday's apparatus — panel, memes, empty chair — has now done its full job: delivering a coronation the trades will quote through awards season and an objection the subject will carry into September 25. and an objection the subject will carry into September 25. The trades have what they need for the season: superlatives banked, a breakout supporting turn identified, a festival narrative sealed. [1][2] Hansen has what he needs for his: a weighed complaint and a premiere he can describe without having seen it. [3][4] Everybody goes home with material. Only the film had to be good. Two verdicts, one weekend, no reconciliation on the calendar.
-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York