Catfish (Thursday, August 12, 2010) (98)

Before I saw this film the one thing I heard was that it's important that you don't know anything about it before you go in, otherwise you would risk ruining the hook of the piece. I will respect that warning and try to say as little as possible as a synopsis and criticism here.

Catfish is a documentary about a New-York-based photographer, Nev, who gets into a "relationship" over Facebook with an artistic family in the Michigan Upper Peninsula. He initially receives paintings inspired by his photographs that are done by the youngest daughter, Abby, and then is contacted by her mother, Angela, and finally falls into a romantic back-and-forth with the oldest daughter, Meg, though only via the interwebs. Curious about who these people are in "real-life" he sets out to visit them.

This is a fascinating examination about ontology and the human experience in the mediated world of the present. Things are not always what they seem on the surface and even deep, emotional interactions can be fractured and digitized.

Filmmakers Ariel Schulman (Nev's brother) and Henry Joost do an adequate job with the presentation, though I think they slip at some point into pure voyeurism and less documentation. They show us the emotion and then keep the cameras rolling in a rather sensationalistic way that I think feels rather uncomfortable and sometimes mean-spirited.

I'm not totally convinced there's much to this film other than "caveat emptor." There's not a lot of discussion of the meaning of Nev's experience and I think it's generally oversimplified to very pop-ish psychology. The story here is really interesting (and I have to trust that it's totally true, though sometimes I had doubts), but the conclusion and evaluation of it is less than brilliant. I'm not convinced that these filmmakers have much more in their tank, but that they just got lucky with a good series of events here.

Stars: 2.5 of 4