In the wake of Joaquin Phoenix’ revelation on Letterman about the untruth of his documentary I’M STILL HERE, the other Facebook movie, CATFISH, expands into more theaters this weekend. Can we trust what is often packaged as a “documentary” these days? Does it matter?
On my television show, The Film Fix, I’ve defended the excellent CATFISH by refusing to take a position whether the movie should be classified as a documentary. The more we learn about the production the less real it seems. But the story of CATFISH exposes a central truth: social networking can be risky, but the risk might be worth it. It is the message of a movie like CATFISH that matters not what genre the film comfortably fits into.
CATFISH uses a documentary visual scope and narrative approach to tell the story of NYC photographer Nev Schulman and his strange Facebook relationship with a very talented family living in rural Michigan. The digital relationship starts when Nev receives a painting in the mail that is based on one of his photographs. After some Googling, Nev discovers who the artist is and a Facebook friendship develops. The artist is allegedly an 8 year-old girl. In time, Nev becomes romantically linked to one of the girl’s step-sisters. But when Nev decides to take that relationship to the next level and meet his cyber girlfriend things get a little weird. CATFISH goes in a direction that no one would expect.
Betrayed by an advertising campaign that takes a page from the Blair Witch/Paranormal school, CATFISH works best as a drama and possibly a documentary. While containing some tense moments, a thriller it is not. And the unraveling of the perfectly edited mystery makes for fascinating viewing. I found myself positively enchanted as the weirdness unfolds.
Raising questions about the dangers and benefits of social networking, the film opens at a perfect time, the calm before what might be a box office storm for the David Fincher/Aaron Sorkin Facebook movie THE SOCIAL NETWORK. Now that I’ve also seen that film, I highly recommend CATFISH as a way to see the side of Facebook not dealt with in the upcoming corporate biography THE SOCIAL NETWORK. CATFISH is the other Facebook movie and contains a message worth seeing regardless whether the events in the movie all true or all made up.
