September 19, 2010

  • Love in the Time of Ethernet

    movies

     

    A young man meets an alluring woman online, or does he? A review of the documentary Catfish, with optional spoilers.

    By Dana Stevens
    Posted Friday, Sept. 17, 2010, at 5:29 PM ET

    A week after seeing Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck’s I’m Still Here, I was wary about Catfish (Rogue Pictures), another documentary in which young men capture the unfolding of dubiously real-life events. Enough already with privileged young white dudes congratulating themselves on their ability to prank an audience. But having seen Catfish, I tend to believe the filmmaker’s protestations (voiced at a contentious panel after the film’s premiere at Sundance) that this movie is on the level. That is to say, I believe the encounter that the film documents really happened, though the filmmakers may have elided or compressed some of the events leading up to it. But of all the twists in Catfish—a movie so twist-dependent that I plan to review it in an unusual format, with optional mouse-overs that reveal spoilers of graduated severity—the most surprising of all is what an honest and thoughtful film it turns out, against all odds, to be.

    At the start, I wasn’t certain how much I was going to enjoy the company of this movie’s creators and protagonists, twentysomething brothers Yaniv (“Nev”) and Ariel (“Rel”) Shulman and Ariel’s filmmaking partner, Henry Joost. They’re nice enough guys—earnest, intelligent, curious—but young, with that mania for documenting each moment of their lives proper to the YouTube generation, and I found myself fearing that their naïve, puppylike enthusiasm was going to wear thin. After all, how much narrative weight can the social-networking woes of three nice middle-class boys really acquire? Once again, the movie has surprises in store.

    The story begins when Nev, a photographer based in New York, strikes up a Facebook correspondence with an 8-year-old girl in Michigan who sends him a painting based on one of his photos. Curious about this precocious girl and her family, Nev “friends” Abby, acting as a kind of artistic mentor and encouraging her to make more work. In the process, he also becomes Facebook friends with Abby’s mother, Angela, and her 19-year-old half-sister, Megan, a dancer, singer and aspiring model.

    Eight months and many Facebook postings, phone conversations, and Gchats later, Nev has become deeply embroiled with this creative family and their network of online friends, and he and Megan are beginning to fall for each other with the hothouse intensity only social media can enable. On a trip to Vail to film a dance festival, Nev, Rel and Henry make a troubling discovery about Megan. Cue the first click-through spoiler, which I would rate as a mild one, far from a movie-ruiner. Put your mouse here  ‘While listening to an mp3 of a song purportedly sung and recorded by Megan at Nev’s request, they discover the exact same recording by a professional singer. Further investigation reveals that Megan and her mother have plagiarized other songs and posted them to Facebook as their own performances. Doubters of Catfish’s authenticity have pointed out that this discovery, which takes place in one seemingly real-time session as the boys gather around the computer screen, seems unnaturally sudden: Wouldn’t there be more of a gradual process by which the fact of Megan’s plagiarism came to light? While I agree that the directors may have engaged in some instant re-enactment to get this stuff on film—“Wait, my camera wasn’t on, can I say that again?”—the revelation that Nev’s too-good-to-be-true-girl really is too good to be true feels authentic to me.
    if you want to hear what the boys learn about Megan in Vail.

    Armed with this new knowledge, or rather, this destabilization of their previous knowledge, Nev, Rel, and Henry set out on a road trip to Ishpeming, the small Michigan town where the family lives. (Coincidentally, it’s a town that’s been featured in the movies before; Ishpeming was the location for the Otto Preminger courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder.) There they discover a family configuration that’s radically different from the one represented on Facebook.  ‘There is no one living at the address where Nev has been writing to Megan. At the address where Abby is supposed to live with her mother, she does indeed live—but Megan is nowhere in sight. Meanwhile, Abby doesn’t seem to understand why she’s being treated as a painting prodigy, and much of the day revolves around caring for Abby’s severely retarded twin half-brothers (who, in a parallelism that would be too obvious in a work of literature, function as the shadow-selves of the Shulmans, two smart, happy brothers who’ve lucked out in life). This middle part of the movie contains some mildly suspenseful scenes—like the moment when the filmmakers drive up the dark, deserted driveway of a horse farm where Megan supposedly lives—that are as close as Catfish comes to justifying its misleading marketing as a “reality thriller.”

    It’s when the boys get to Michigan that the movie goes from being a clumsily constructed video diary to a fascinating exploration of the deceptions—of self and others—made possible by the Internet. As they untangle the Facebook world from the real one, their quest to expose the truth about Megan and her family instead forces them to expose uncomfortable truths about themselves. Faced with the reality of driving in the dark down a stranger’s driveway, they panic and debate about whether to go forward or turn back. In their Michigan hotel room, Nev nervously reads aloud from an intimate text-message exchange with Megan, hiding beneath the covers when the naughty banter gets too embarrassing, but still somehow compelled to keep going.

    Joost and the Shulmans experienced that rare stroke of rookie documentarians’ luck; during the course of filming their movie, it became a different, deeper, and better movie because of what happened to take place, not necessarily because of their skill in capturing it. } new Tip(‘sidebar3′, “There is no Megan, at least not one who was ever in communication with Nev. Angela Wesselman, the middle-aged, stay-at-home mother of Abby and the primary subject of the last third of Catfish, made her up, along with all the dozen or so “friends” in dialogue with Nev on her Facebook page, using photos and facts culled from Internet and from her own life. She, not her daughter, is the creator of all the paintings, and has been passing them off as her child’s work to get attention. In effect, Angela has been engineering a fictional world as a way to make Nev fall in love with her, and making up whatever lies she needs to in order to hold that world together. There are some hard-to-watch cringe-cam scenes as Angela gradually owns up to these offenses, but the movie’s last moments have a tenderness that goes beyond the format of the did-she-or-didn’t-she reveal.  As Nev sits for a pencil portrait, he and Angela revisit the virtual love affair they created together over the past eight months. He looks straight at her as she draws, with affection and a kind of awe. Her voice as she details her process in weaving a web of online lies sounds flustered and abashed, but also proud, and her hand on the pencil is sure. It’s pretty clear who the artist in the room is, and it’s not the guys behind the camera. .

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    Dana Stevens is Slate‘s movie critic.

    Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2267433/

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