Cinema Verdict Review: Catfish

Catfish

OPENING: 09/17/2010

STUDIO: Rogue Productions

RUN TIME: 94 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
Don’t let anyone tell you what it is. But why?

Opening Statement
Since January of this year, I have sworn off watching trailers for any movies. Due to a particularly terrible response (known in my family as the “Moon” backlash), I have since refused to let trailers determine my expectations of any film. The realization finally sank in that the bill of sales being peddled to me by a marketing team is not always what I get when I open the package. All mixed metaphors aside, I changed so I could enter each movie as fresh as possible. Everything was going according to plan, until now. The tagline for the new film Catfish is, “Don’t let anyone tell you what it is.” All I’ve heard from any small hushed up reviewer I happen to catch is that the film is better the less you know about it. Fine with me. As I was no longer watching trailers, all I had to do was avert my eyes from any written news–not difficult. After all, I had done it for Inception. Catfish is a much smaller film and therefore simpler to avoid. However the level of anticipation growing within myself for what the film’s “secret” was had reached levels that even I had not noticed. Was there a special recipe for catfish that was uncovered which cures cancer? Did the documentarians find a family that kept catfish only to hide the stink of their murder victims? Did they dress up catfish as Shakespearian characters and act out Othello? I was expecting, if not a twist, at least a huge reveal. A big gasp moment. It never came.

Facts of the Case
I will not be giving away any of the facts of this film. Let me explain why.

The Evidence
My information depravity had worked against me. Perhaps because of whom I am, perhaps because I’ve heard so many stories, there is always in the back of my head, a small portion of my cognizance that gets relegated to predicting how the story will play out. Because of that, and because I was told that there was something that the film would reveal which was to be held as a secret, I was looking forwards toward the secret and was therefore backwards engineering the film. Consequently, I inserted my own level of malevolence on the happy opening scenes where Nev Schulman, a professional photographer is sent a painting done by an 8 year old of a picture he’s taken. By the time he meets the rest of the seemingly perfect and beautiful family, I had figured out, as I’m sure some of you have just by reading this, the main crux of what was going to happen. “That can’t be it though,” I told myself, “There has to be something more sinister, more diabolical that I cannot even fathom to justify the marketing ploy.”

But that was it. That was it! There was nothing even remotely devilish going on, only decisions made that were desperate and sad and miscommunications which took too long to clear up. Only after the ending credits started rolling and my expectations of costumed fish spouting old English were dashed did I understand that the reason you can’t tell anyone about the film is not to hide a secret, but because the film is able to be to summed up in a single sentence. Once that sentence is uttered, you lose the reason, the experience of watching the film without prejudice and just letting it tell you its story. The hype that is built up by this type of marketing is, I feel, unhealthy for the film. It may put butts in seats, but if the audience’s response is similar to mine, it will let lots of people down and won’t become the rewatchable documentary it could be.

Closing Statement
All that said, Catfish is a good film, even a great film – a solid 7 out of 10. I don’t want to penalize the film for being unsuccessfully promoted, or make it appear that I thought it was poorly made. On the contrary, I thought that it handled its subject matter with the amount of delicacy and honesty needed. In fact, near the end, I thought there was a little too much honesty and that perhaps all that I’d just watched had been a farce; that they had pulled the wool over my eyes and orchestrated the entire story. However reading interviews with filmmakers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, they state that everything happened as is shown and that nothing was fabricated. If that is the case, I really want to know what the people in the documentary felt and thought after they saw the film the first time (hint: special features on the DVD). The integration of Google Maps to show travel (the updated version of a globe with a plane trailing a dotted line), and the use of Facebook and texting as a means of discovering and getting to know people you’ve never met helps the film tap into the zeitgeist. Perhaps that’s what they were going for with the marketing. Just like meeting people face to face whom you’ve been talking to online for months, the hype doesn’t always meet the expectations.

The Verdict

7/10

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