Catfish and other fry

Your reaction to a documentary has a lot to do with the expectation of truth that you bring to it.  For me that yielded a response to Catfish (2010, MC-65) that was just the opposite of my reaction to The Cove, each documentary arriving with some question in the air about its relation between fact and artifice.  With The Cove, that skepticism was amply confirmed by the “mission impossible” vibe, so I wound up thinking the whole thing was a hoax, which maybe it wasn’t.  With Catfish, however, the approach was so modest and D-I-Y, that I granted some trust to its reality, and I did not find myself disappointed.  Perhaps some reviewers were put off by the way the film was being pitched, as a real-life thriller, and refused to be had.  But I found the whole operation sincere, if conscious of effect and aimed to a purpose.  But that purpose was not to unmask a Web imposter, but to get to the real person under the mask, and in the process make multiple points about social media, NYC vs. the Heartland, as well as art in the construction of identity and personality.  Ariel Schulman, with Henry Joost, set out to make a film about his brother Nev’s internet romance with not just a young woman but her whole family out in Upper Michigan, and his eventual quest to meet them in person.  To my mind, the DVD extra with the three of them sitting together and answering questions about the film more than confirms their genuine geniality, and the essential honesty and good will of the project.  See for yourself, but for me this is the real deal.

Not so real but fun just the same was I Love You, Man (2009, MC-70), which one reviewer accurately described as the best Judd Apatow film that Judd Apatow had nothing to do with.  Apatow regulars Paul Rudd and Jason Segel are, however, at the heart of this bromance, and writer-director John Hamburg does mix in a good measure of psychological truth along with the gross-out humor, so this tickles the funny bone without insulting the brain.

In an odd coupling, even odder than Paul and Jason, I have to mention another film about the bond between men.  Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (Novocento) (1976) follows the lives of two boys born on the same day in 1900, who grow up to be Robert DeNiro as the padrone, and Gerard Depardieu as the peasant communist, whose lifelong friendship and antagonism comes to a head on Liberation Day in 1945, with the overthrow of evil Fascist Donald Sutherland, whose leering performance typifies this film’s cartoonish approach to the politics of the first half of the 20^th century.  Even after I decided against showing this film in a peasant-themed series I am doing at the Clark next summer, as tie-in to a Pissarro exhibition, I persisted through its original 5 ½ hour length, for the operatic elements that overcame a lot of awkwardness.  I watched it dubbed in English to get the real voice of DeNiro and the other American actors, but perhaps the Italian would have seemed less stilted.  Burt Lancaster wanders in from Visconti’s Leopard, along with many other borrowings from that master, but this film’s ambition of depicting brotherhood with historical sweep would eventually be achieved much more fully in a later Italian epic, The Best of Youth.