Capturing the Friedmans

Released:  June 13^th, 2003

Rated:  Not Rated

Distributor:  Magnolia Pictures

Starring:  Arnold Friedman, Elaine Friedman, David Friedman, Jesse Friedman

Directed by:  Andrew Jarecki

Personal Bias Alert:  likes crime docs, has voyeuristic tendancies

9.5 of 10

            Documentaries, like all genres, can be broken down into subtypes.  There’s crime, historical, scientific, cultural, etc, all of which occasionally intertwine within the same piece.  Capturing the Friedmans is one of those mixers, using the attention-grabbing crime format (see Jarecki’s more recent The Jinx for proof of how popular this can be) to hook you into the film’s real story:  the rapid disintegration of a quintessential American family. 

Under the microscope is the Friedmans, an upper-middle class Jewish family consisting of three boys (David, Seth, and Jesse), a stay-at-home mom (Elaine), and a father who was a respected teacher (Arnold).  Arnold, as it turns out, also indulged in pedophilic pornography, and the police’s discovery of one such magazine in the late ‘80s opened a sinkhole that would drag his entire family down with him.  The police alleged that Arnold and his youngest son, Jesse, engaged in gross sexual abuse of the boys in their after-school computer class, which one investigator evocatively referred to as a ‘free-for-all’.  Arnold and Jesse denied these claims, and as the charges stacked up and the trial loomed, oldest son David inexplicable turned on his camera to document their downfall.

David’s voluminous footage forms the core of the film, providing a wide-eyed look at a disaster few people have ever experienced.  There’s a voyeuristic fascination to watching it all go down, the same inappropriately inquisitive drive that leads all of us to take in stories of the strange and the disturbing.   The Friedmans, it seems, were primed for just such a breakdown, as the stress of the accusations broadened preexisting fissures and personal blind spots.  Their screaming fits and constant needling is drama of the highest order, melding with the crime backdrop and the inescapable fact that this seemingly stable family descended to such an ugly place makes Capturing the Friedmans into a riveting piece of real-life horror.

The backdrop proves to be just as salacious as the behind-the-scenes footage, as director Andrew Jarecki establishes just how heinous the charges against the father and son are through interviews with police and victims.  It’s here, though, that Jarecki makes his lone and minor misstep.  The assemblage of the footage, with hard cuts that immediately put into question the more shocking claims made by the police and even the victims, shows that Jarecki was far from objective about the case.  Since the film was released, it’s been uncovered that Jarecki funded Jesse Friedman’s legal battles, and while Jarecki is certainly sympathetic towards Arnold, he’s downright campaigning for Jesse’s innocence through this documentary.  While it’s hard to argue that the charges against the two weren’t trumped up, the oddities of the situation leave it difficult to digest Jarecki’s firm stance.

While Jarecki does come down hard on the prosecution’s case, he uses this questioning to bring to light some very real and very uncomfortable scenarios.  His explanation for how these charges might’ve been conjured will shake your confidence in police procedures and the reliability of the human mind, calling into question how anyone could truly be sure about what happened in those computer classes.  Couple that with the insistent and borderline delusional proclamations of innocence from David Friedman and the film becomes representative of how much humanity likes to deny that we live a hazy, incomprehensible world.

With all this depth to back up the surface pleasures, Capturing the Friedmans is the kind of documentary that can be taken in on a few different levels.  The first viewing will likely overwhelm you no matter what you’re trying to get from it, but in spite of all its grimness, this is a documentary that demands multiple viewings if you ever want to find out everything it has to offer.

Other Notes:

Ø  The scene around the dinner table where Arnold quietly resigns himself to letting it all fall apart is the kind of unnervingly honest moment that a film crew simply isn’t able to capture.

Ø  Sex abuse and a crumbling family wasn’t what Jarecki set out to document.  He initially interviewed David Friedman for a short on NYC clowns.

Ø  The film lost Best Documentary Feature at the 2004 Oscars to the Errol Morris-led The Fog of War.