Capturing the Friedmans 

Directed by Andrew Jarecki

Starring Arnold, Elaine, David, Seth and Jesse Friedman

107 minute runtime

Unrated

In what may be the most amazing home movie of all time, director Andrew Jarecki takes the audience through the bizarre self-destruction of the upper-middle class Friedman family of affluent Great Neck, Long Island.  This movie will not be televised on Funniest Home Videos.

The winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2003, the movie stars four of the five members of the Friedman family, two of which were accused of child molestation in 1987 as a result of a police sting operation searching for child pornography.  The two accused were the father, Arnold, and the youngest son, Jesse.  Both eventually went to prison for their crimes, although they maintained to the end that they were the victims of a witch hunt by a socially paranoid mob in the smug, inbred suburb of Great Neck.  This contradiction forms the basis of the movie, which is a series of excellent and focused hand-held camera shots that slowly merge, Rashomon style, into the story of the Friedmans.

There is no question that the Friedman family was (and is) different.  There were some ghosts in their closet, personality quirks that could have used professional help.  But they were not that different from any other family.  They had the same strengths and weaknesses and showed a certain amount of unity as they were shunned by the world for the most heinous of crimes: molestation and sexual intercourse with children who attended computer lessons in their home.

The most amazing quirk of all is that when the first accusations were filed and the police came and took Arnold and Jesse away in hand-cuffs, setting bail at a whopping one million dollars, the first thing son David did was start recording the whole thing on video tape.  This recording includes the most private, and sometimes violent, family interactions that followed during the next several years as the Friedmans circled their wagons and struggled with their legal and moral defense.  This incredible footage, shot by the Friedmans, takes you into their house, to their dinner table, to their strategy planning sessions and makes you a part of the overwhelming stress of their public humiliation.

The liberal audience (Greenwich Village) with which I saw the movie wanted to label the whole affair as a witch hunt.  And the story obligingly started off in that direction with some insightful testimony by one of the detectives on how “kids are very impressionable and you have to tell them what you want.”  This amazing statement of incompetence really got the audience going.  This movie is going to be a piece of cake, we thought.  The usual police screw-up and subsequent public hysteria by the brainless populace.  An easy and acceptable explanation. 

But as the movie progresses and the puzzle of the accusations, charges and counter-charges from without and within is assembled, the mystery is not reconciled.  Indeed, the more facts that are recounted, the harder it is to come to a conclusion.  The entire story is a tar-baby of truths, untruths and half-truths that even the Friedmans themselves can’t sort out.  This is what saves this remarkable movie from becoming just another TV law and order skit.  The audience expects the story to be revealed and to culminate with a revelation of the truth; but the plot refuses to offer any such thing.  It refuses to take the weight of the complexity off the viewers and offer a simple explanation.  Quite the contrary; with every scene the baggage of the Friedman’s past is added to the shoulders of the audience.  The viewers become part of the family, beaten by their own inability to make sense out of their story; unable to determine even their own guilt or innocence.

The audience never knows the whole truth about Arnold’s sexual experiments with his brother and with Jesse and their wife and mother Elaine’s frigidity.  Or the whacko testimonies of students who claimed to have been raped dozens of times, only to sign up the next semester for more of the same.  To the very end the participants offer contradictory testimonies, apparently responding to internal agendas that we can only attempt to understand.  In the conclusion of the story, the courts and lawyers join in the fray and are proved incompetent to deal with the crimes.  Compromises are made that make the original accusations pale in comparison.

The movie reminded me a little of “Blair Witch Project” in which a group of teenagers supposedly films their own demise at the hands of a never-revealed evil entity.  This same ill-defined evil is at work in the Friedman family, but the monstrous difference is that the Friedmans really are filming the story themselves.  Nothing is made up, including the significant prison sentences Arnold and Jesse suffered and Arnold’s eventual death in prison, a suspected suicide.  Is this huge self-exposure, this incredible vulnerability insanity or courage?  Was it their way of dealing with the stress by getting it out of their heads and onto tape?  Or was it just their own arrogance to the bitter end?  Like Richard Nixon making recordings for his own archives that would eventually spell his doom.  When director Andrew Jarecki was asked if he thought the Friedmans were innocent or guilty, he said he didn’t know.

A triumph for director Jarecki in his first effort.  His next movie is a short entitled “Just a Clown” that is apparently screening at the Sundance Film Festival this month (January, 2004).  Don’t miss either one of these if they are showing near you.