Review of Catfish (2010) by Richie W — 08 Mar 2013

Almost Exactly the Opposite of What I Expected.

I refuse to get drawn into a discussion of whether or not this is real. Sometimes, it matters. Sometimes, it doesn't. Sometimes, as in the case of [i]Exit Through the Gift Shop[/i], I don't think there's any doubt. Sometimes, as in the case of [i]Fargo[/i], the discussion of what's real and fake overwhelms what ought to be discussed about the film, and I suspect that may be part of the deal with this. Actually, I don't remember any discussion when it came out as to whether it was real or fake, just that you should Never Let Anyone Spoil It For You. I don't think there's much to say if I don't, so this is going to be a review with spoilers. Of course, every single discussion of whether it's real or fake becomes a discussion with spoilers, because it has to. What people are really asking is if the ending is plausible. All I will say is, "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog.".

Yaniv "Nev" Schulman is a photographer, and not a bad one. One day, one of his photographs gets printed in [i]The New York Times[/i]. Some time later, he gets a picture from a little girl, Abby, who did a painting based on his photo. It's pretty good, especially since Abby is eight. Nev and Abby begin a correspondence. He also communicates with her mother, Angela, and her sister, Megan. In fact, the communications between Nev and Megan become pretty emotional--and sexual. Megan is nineteen, and Nev is twenty-four, and they hit it off, and she is beautiful, and so it's not all that surprising. There is also a wide streak of talent running through the family; Megan and her brother, Alex, are both musical in addition to Abby's painting. Nev's brother and friend, Ariel "Rel" Schulman and Henry Joost, are filmmakers, and they film bits and pieces about Nev's relationship with Abby, Megan, and family. Slowly, they begin to suspect that something is wrong, and they surprise the family by traveling to see them.

Honestly, what I thought was going to happen was that Rel and Henry set the whole thing up. I grant you that would be challenging, since Nev got packages from Michigan, but there are ways of handling that--especially in 2008, when all of this took place. It was long enough ago that a nineteen-year-old with only a handful of Facebook friends wasn't completely unbelievable, but it was recently enough that you could still manage all sorts of things on the internet. Would it have been a cruel joke? Oh, yes. Yes, it would have. It would have been substantially more cruel than the truth turned out to be. However, since I had somehow gotten the impression that this movie was about an online predator of a rather more serious kind, even a truly cruel joke wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. It would also explain the decision to start filming the whole thing, though that's also explained by being the kind of people who film everything, which I do understand.

At the very least, Nev had an unclear perception of what life is like outside New York. He believed that a nineteen-year-old owned her own farm . . . that had horses as part of the purchase. I mean, sometimes, you get the appliances when you buy a house, but you don't get the horses. At most, I figured it was probably something like a boarding stable, and she just took over the contracts. You know--they weren't her horses, but there were horses living on the farm, and there was a reason for her to keep having them. But even with essentially no knowledge of what the movie was about--I don't think I even read the Netflix envelope--I figured out that there was something wrong with that happy little family much faster than Nev did. He has taken a lot of grief for not doing a Google search earlier, and I do kind of believe his claim--when he didn't find these people, he assumed it was because they were rural, where not everything ends up online. But the farm thing bothered me right away.

To be honest, I think that's one of the issues with the fact that we live in a country as large and diverse as the United States. (Assuming you do; probably not all of my readers are Americans!) It is possible to literally not know that the answer to "this doesn't make sense to me" is not "well, that must be how they do things in [other part of the country, where you have never been]." The simplest example I can give is that, before moving to rural Washington State, I had no idea that [i]anyone[/i] listened to both country and gangsta rap. Heck, I didn't even know that "liquor store" mean "a state-run store which is the only place in town where you can acquire hard alcohol." (This is no longer true, but it was until quite recently.) Back Home, the sentence "I'm going down to the liquor store to buy some gum" is actually spoken. Okay. If this is real, Nev's problems are a bit deeper than just that. However, I do think it contributed. It papered over some of the cracks. I do still wonder how good Angela was at faking voices, though.