Catfish

Jesse Thompson

Catfish:  Film Review

           

            Can Catfish be taken at face value as a pure documentary film following a trio of young filmmakers from New York who unwittingly become caught up in a complex web of fabricated communications with a family where everything is not as it seems and then go searching deeper to find the truth.  Maybe not. But the clever ways in which the film presents its story with a heart lends a genuineness to the characters on screen that makes it endearing. While the ending for the film has absolutely nothing to do with any real life horror story that the trailers for Catfish misleadingly imply, it lends a good story arc to the film and gives a deeper message to its social commentary.

           

            The film focuses on Nev Shulman, a mid twenty something photographer living in New York who becomes 21st century technology pen pals with an 8 year girl Abby from Michigan and her family after she is inspired to do a painting of a photograph he had published in a magazine and send it to him. As times passes, Nev continues to receive paintings, some also based off his photographs from the prodigious young artist and he connects with the other members of her family, their circle of online friends and begins to develop a long distance flirtative romance with her 19 year old half sister Megan.

           

            As Nev is filmed by his older brother Ariel and their friend Henry Joost, his relationship with Megan evolves with shared conversations and back and forth's over phonecalls, texts, picture msgs, emails, Facebook posts, and online chatting (sans webcams). Only after Megan, who is quite attractive on her Facebook profile, talented at dancing, horse riding and music playing, says she will record acoustic versions of requested songs from Nev, and then the claiming to be original results sound exactly like versions easily found on Youtube does Nev begin to become interested in looking deeper into whether these persons are everything they claim. After only a little investigating on the Google, Nev and friends find that there is no mention of a young artist named Abby in any local Ishpeming news, nor are they in a process of renovating an old JC Penny's building on Main street for her gallery space. They begin to find other inconsistencies in Megan's and her family's stories  and this leads the crew to set out for Rural Michigan to uncover the truth.

           

            After driving past the farm house which Megan supposedly lives at 2am, to find no horses and finding postcards from Nev still placed possibly too perfectly in the mailbox, they decide to show up to Sunday "family breakfast" at Abby and her family's home the next morning. So surprise, someone's been fooling Nev the entire 8 months since the his first correspondence with the Michigan family. There is some suspense, as Nev knocks on the door and the audience is shown a family much different than the picture perfect online profiles that had been presented, but at this point it can be seen that the young filmmakers struggle with how to proceed, and worry that their film will falter in its climax. If Catfish is an actual documentary then it is certainly to the filmmakers credit that they proceeded to dig deeper into the reasons for the complex web of deceptions that leads to a very humanizing look at a person living out an online fantasy life to make up for areas of her life that are unfulfilled and drowned in duty and regrets. Relationships developing over distances through false identities in the film is most likely a very common one in the age of Facebook and anonymous online exchanges. I doubt that the films veracity is completely true with these hipster techsmart New York guys who are already starting to make a documentary of Nev's communications with this family and never once search out more often than not easily found information online that could back up their stories, and that certain spontaneous scenes were not actually filmed later to capture that "Aha!" moment. But who cares? Kudos to these guys for being clever, and although it may certainly have been cruel to then string this disturbed women along after they discovered some levels of her lies to Nev, it was something she very much enjoyed doing, and now she's been able to begin to address some parts of her life she has not been living and I bet has sold a good bundle of those paintings with her website and the film's good reception at Sundance and elsewhere, so win-win situation for both her and the "Documentary" filmmakers I'd say overall.   

               

                Angela's real life husband, Vince, seems like a very decent guy in the film and he dispenses a wonderful local fishing based story with a life lesson from which the films gets its name towards the end of the film. When they used to ship cod from Michigan and the Great Lakes areas to China and other places in these huge vats. When the cod made it their destination however, their skin was and taste were mushy from their inactivity during the journey. So, someone cleverly decided to include some catfish in the vats that would nip at the fins of the cod and keep them agile and delicious. In life, there are people who are catfish who are there to always keep us guessing and from becoming stagnant. We should be grateful for these catfish in our lives for keeping us on our toes, thus energizing us and not letting our lives become mundane or purposeless.