On Monday, October 5th, ignoring the mountain of responsibilities piling up on my desk, I attended a 6:45 showing of Digger, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s dark comedy starring Tom Cruise, at Bennington Cinemas. The next day, I returned, this time to see Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime.
It’s very easy to get a student discount at Bennington Cinemas when you pull up in the shuttle. I like to arrive for a movie about 10 minutes before it starts. This leaves enough time to talk about graduate school applications, spill half your popcorn, adjust your recliner seat (only $6.50 on Tuesdays!), and then give your full attention to the ads that play before the movie. In addition to our local version of Nicole Kidman’s AMC pre-show video––the Bennington House of Tile and Carpet ad––this week we were treated to an ad for 250th anniversary celebrations of the Battle of Bennington–which a stranger sitting a few rows in front of us remarked was “fucking inspirational.”
Both of the movies I saw this week grapple with what it means to create something entertaining in pursuit of making the world a better place. In both movies, fiction is almost as strange as truth.
Digger
Tom Cruise (in prosthetics and makeup that make him look a little bit closer to his age) plays Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon from a long line of oil tycoons. The only creature he shows genuine affection for is a mangled, mangy old cat on the verge of death, who he hand-feeds tuna from cans he keeps in his bedside table. When he finds out that his company’s relentless drilling off the coast of Iceland has caused a large piece of the ice shelf to break off, heading for Europe and guaranteeing the displacement and death of hundreds of thousands, he must decide how to respond.
At this point, I must warn the reader that Digger is a difficult movie to review without spoilers. There’s a pretty major twist, which is masterfully timed. The viewer has just enough time to figure out what the movie is about before having the rug completely pulled out from under them. It is also a twist that I was surprised not to have spoiled for me. Perhaps this is because much of the social media discussion of the movie has revolved around the trailer, which led many to think that Digger would be a musical (it’s not, but I sort of wish it was!). Perhaps it is also because the movie is, to put it mildly, not doing well at the box office. Anyway, spoilers ahead.
The characters in Digger are caricatures of the types of men who control the world we currently live in. John Goodman’s President Compson is a clear analogy for Donald Trump, with a cabinet of sycophantic yes-men (no women), a stupid, sweaty vice president, and a personal preacher who speaks in tongues. Just as everything is feeling a bit over the top, a bit too on the nose, reality breaks: it is revealed that what we have been watching thus far is actually a play. Tom Cruise is not Digger Rockwell, but an actor playing a character called Digger Rockwell. The movie is not really set in our time, but years in the future, after the events of the play took place. Stay with me here: the play is based on a true story. It’s a satire within a satire.
It’s a pretty genius move. The movie weaves the play in with the lives of the actors, allowing us to act as an audience to both the play within the movie and the movie itself. When the illusion is broken, the audience gains access to the mechanisms behind the impressive sets of the play. We see the strings holding things up; we see hands moving miniatures. This does not make the effects less impressive–in fact, it makes them much more interesting to witness.
I won’t spoil any more, but the movie does end on a pretty grim note–one which fell a bit flat for me. I prefer an intellectual argument about the value of entertainment and plays within plays to a gritty dystopian future. The latter feels tired, which is disappointing after a film which makes so many unexpected moves. I also couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t lament how underused Sandra Huller is in this movie- she was admittedly my primary motivation for seeing it.
Digger makes a lot of moves I don’t like, but I can’t say it doesn’t make them well, and there’s something pretty satisfying about a movie which is so self-consciously over the top. Arguments about the morality of making light of atrocities and injustices clear the way for the viewer to really enjoy the making light.
Primetime
Primetime, directed by Lance Oppenheim, is a movie which will leave you feeling terrible–a testament to the skill with which it is executed. The film is a retelling of the events leading up to the suicide of a potential subject of an episode of the Dateline NBC show To Catch A Predator. Robert Pattinson stars as host Chris Hansen, flanked by Merritt Weaver as Andie Bender, his chronically gum-chewing producer, and Skyler Gisondo as “Decoy Dan,” a young aspiring actor who pretends to be a preteen boy to lure “predators” in front of the cameras.
In an early scene in Primetime, Chris Hansen is attempting to buy candy from a vending machine. It gets stuck, and he calls the service number on the side of the machine. “I’m Chris Hansen, with Dateline NBC,” he says. We watch as he records a promo for the show, reciting the voiceover again and again no matter how perfect the crew says it is. “I want to participate in your life, but I can only do it in obfuscated ways,” he tells his mistress. Pattinson is a pitch-perfect deranged robot man, walking the delicate line between humor and horror.
Much of the movie’s plot is driven by a decision Jeff Zucker, head of NBC (played by himself), makes early on. Predator will be moved to the same time slot as Lost, one of the most popular shows in America. The concept of television being scheduled at all feels almost comical in the age of streaming. Hansen explains to his young children that primetime is the period when the most people are watching TV–subtle exposition for Generation Z viewers who may not know what the movie’s title refers to.
Once Predator moves to primetime, the pressure is on. The crew works to find the worst “predators” they possibly can. It’s chilling, seeing the profit-motivated glee at worse and worse depravity. Watching the Predator crew cackle gleefully behind the cameras, the viewer is forced to almost side with the predators themselves. These compulsive, bumbling, and ultimately vulnerable men don’t seem like the “ancient evil” Pattinson’s Hansen insists that they are, next to the manipulative, ratings-driven crew luring them to public humiliation and arrest. One particularly effective device is the frequent glimpses we get into Hansen’s obsessive rehearsals of his confrontations. He reads the online messages the decoys receive, and we realize that he is perhaps worse than the men whose words he is repeating.
Skyler Gisondo and Merritt Weaver also give masterful performances. Gisondo is sincere, naïve, motivated to participate in To Catch a Predator purely by the opportunity to secure a SAG card. He ends up being an excellent decoy, but it’s work that blurs the lines between acting and reality. Watching his internal struggle over the morality of what he’s doing and his desire for recognition, we start to realize that, in a certain way, he genuinely is a victim, not just playing one. Weaver manipulates everyone around her with a disturbingly calm voice and absolutely frantic energy.
I left Primetime feeling pessimistic. During a week when Pete Hegseth announced his intentions to live-broadcast a firing squad execution, I couldn’t help but think that Primetime was almost a look back at a simpler time–a time when public humiliation leading to suicide could actually get a show taken off the air, before Instagram and TikTok live gave everyone the chance to become their own Chris Hansen.
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