Catfish Unfurls

Unless you’ve been actively pursuing the plot, you’ve no doubt been aware of the lure of the documentary Catfish. They’ve been successful keeping the plot on the downlow and everyone who’s seen it always says the same thing: you’re better off seeing it knowing nothing.

To that end, marketing the film has been tricky. From the Washington Post’s Celebritology blog:

Rogue Pictures, the studio that — in conjunction with Relativity Media and Universal Pictures — is distributing “Catfish,” has apparently taken a two-sided approach. The promotional tagline for the movie, which appears on the posters and on the official Web site, is “Don’t let anyone tell you what it is,” a warning to moviegoers that they should go into theaters as uninformed about the details as possible.

Yet, in the promotional material for the film, the studio tells us exactly what they’d like us to think the movie is: “A reality thriller that is a shocking product of our times.” The trailer also plays up that thriller angle, which is enticing but — having seen the film — not an accurate representation of what this absorbing documentary is truly about.

In Contention’s Kris Tapley draws a parallel between Catfish and The Social Network, calling them the two most important films of 2010. Not having seen Catfish I can’t vouch for this claim. Tapley writes:

After the jump, I am going to talk about “Catfish” in extensive detail. There will most certainly be SPOILERS, and I urge you (unless you couldn’t care less, of course) not to click through until you’ve had a chance to see the film. (The poster even implores, “Don’t let anyone tell you what it is.”) That’s about as clear as I can be in the way of a warning, so, if you’d like to proceed…

So if you’re a spoiler-free kind of person, don’t click over. But if you’re like me and you want to know what it’s about, he gives a good plot rundown. It sounds like Capturing the Friedmans a bit – one of those happy accidents that occur after the cameras roll. Unfortunately for me, now that I know the twist, the whole effect, as was cautioned to me, has been kind of ruined. I’ll still see it but I won’t have the jaw-dropping reaction.

Meanwhile, it isn’t faring that well with critics thus far. EW’s Lisa Schwarzbaum gave the film a C+, writing:

Catfish is the artful, slippery, at times downright fishy chronicle of what happens when Yaniv Schulman, a photogenic real-life twentysomething photographer, goes to Michigan to find out. The film is a v√©rit√©-style meditation on the construction of personal identity in the age of friending, sexting, and otherwise living life by one’s typing thumbs. But in ways its savvy young creators don’t control, Catfish is also an unnerving specimen of coolio narrative gamesmanship in which real life becomes just one big Facebook post. There’s a reason the film is billed as a ”reality thriller”: Since no one expects reality shows to be real, filmmakers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost can evade pesky questions of what they knew, when they knew it, and how (not to mention why) they went ahead with their project.

Finally, as someone who has been online since 1994 I can tell you that there is nothing new about this kind of romantic illusion. It has been around as long as I’ve been online. Honey, I could tell you stories. But I still want to see the movie.