REVIEW Catfish

Say this about Sundance darling Catfish, a low-budget documentary that became the subject of a bidding war, was immersed in a controversy over its veracity and now gets a national release: It sure is a talker, whether you like the film or not.

It’s about a young New York photographer, Nev Schulman, who develops a Facebook relationship first with Abby, an apparently talented 8-year-old girl in Michigan who likes to send him paintings reproducing photos he took, and then with the girl’s 19-year-old half-sister, Megan, with whom he flirts. He soon begins talking to Megan by telephone.

The relationship is from Nev’s point of view, filmed on digital video by his brother, Ariel Schulman, and their friend Henry Joost, who are credited as co-directors. A few months into the situation, Nev and company become suspicious of certain aspects of the Michigan girls’ story, and one day they decide to go meet them.

What they find in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is something the filmmakers don’t want you to know, to preserve the suspense. This has created marketing problems - the trailer makes it look like this year’s The Blair Witch Project. Yet even those who like the film would agree that inclusion of a surprise twist does not make it, even remotely, a thriller.

That makes it difficult to writeabout, because so much of what makes this film successful or unsuccessful depends on the revelation and how it is handled.

Without giving anything meaningful away, here are a few observations:

Of the film’s 86 minutes, almost an hour leads up to the trip to Michigan, leaving about 20 minutes to what they find there. This would be fine if: (a) Nev and his filmmaking companions were incredibly interesting; and (b) the Facebook relationship he is having was interesting. Nev and his pals are utterly uninteresting - smug, sarcastic, self-absorbed. The Facebook relationship and Nev’s phone conversations with Megan are made of the most mundane stuff.

What they find in Michigan is very sad. Unfortunately, the New York slickers make very little attempt to understand them, treating them more like freak show attractions.

I keep hearing how “shocking” and “original” this film and its twist are. Anyone who saw The Night Listener, or Talhotblond, a much better documentary from last year,knows this is nothing new.

There is some question about whether this film really is a documentary. I think the Michigan family is real. Nonetheless, much of it appears very contrived.

That doesn’t make it a bad film: Exit Through the GiftShop, a recent documentary about graffiti artists, had similar truth issues, but it was a fantastic movie nonetheless.

Unlike Exit, Catfish isn’t able to make the leap from odd incident to an indictment of our times.

Catfish83Cast: documentary, with Nev SchulmanDirectors: Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost Rating: PG-13 Running time: 86 minutes

MovieStyle, Pages 29 on 10/29/2010

Upcoming Events