Capturing the Friedmans

**** out of ****

There’s a timeless, clichéd quote that you find on many a movie poster from several of your favorite film critics (or, more likely, critics that you’ve never heard of): “This movie will make you think!” Another variation: “A thinking person’s movie.” Capturing the Friedmans is one of those special cases in which such a quote is not only appropriate, but it is also an understatement. It’s been a week since I saw this documentary with my wife, and it is still fresh in our minds. We can’t help but talk about it, prod at it, question the characters’ actions, and speculate on what the truth might be from the testimonies and reports that it offers. It is absolutely fascinating and compelling—one of the best and most important modern American films ever made. How did I miss it for this long?

Like all the great modern American films—careful, unparalleled works like Raging Bull, Do the Right Thing, Nashville, Apocalypse Now, and Bonny and Clyde—Capturing the Friedmans is a difficult film to describe, let alone review. It features a trial against a father and son accused of sodomizing elementary schoolers, yet it is not about pedophiles. It laments about the legal process (or lack thereof) taken against the defendants—accusations that range from solid (child pornography found) to so outlandish (mass, violent orgies in hour-long computer classes, including a sexual variation of Leap Frog) that we are forced to wonder if the officers in charge of the case ever graduated from law school; still, this film is not necessarily about the justice system.

Rather, Capturing the Friedmans is first and foremost a film about family—about family dynamics and the science of dysfunction. It tells the now infamous story of Arnie Friedman, his wife Elaine, and their three sons David, Seth, and Jesse, the latter who was sentenced alongside his father for sexual assault against young boys. Without these intimate sequences, the film could have been interchangeable with a special on the Crime Channel; it is these family moments that gives it its true spirit and backbone. Whether or not Arnie and Jesse are guilty of all of the accusations against them is not the point. Rather, this is a film about the way that the family faced the trial, and the pain and agony that it put them through. Truces are made, lines are crossed, and emotions shift as rapidly as pinballs within the small, seemingly tight band, and all we can do is watch in desperation as this “normal” urban family crumbles—no, shatters—before our eyes.

But see, I’m so caught up in the raw, guttural emotion of this film that I’m getting ahead of myself. A bit more summary is due: Arnie was an award winning jazz musician and computer teacher, a highlight of his community in Great Neck, before he was caught with child pornography when he was his mid-sixties. This discovery by Long Island police led to his eventual conviction for child molestation. While there is no question that Arnie indeed purchased child porn, there are the aforementioned details of the case that leads to the doubt of some if not all of the molestation charges. Director Andrew Jarecki is sympathetic to the Friedmans’ struggles and the lack of significant evidence, but he wisely interviews all parties involved—both the defense and the prosecution—to create an accurate picture that only reveals that we will never really know the whole story.

There are plenty of web sites and discussion groups already actively underway concerning the evidence, the facts and outcome of the case, and the controversy. Because of that, I will spare my readers that information and my own thoughts on the involved parties and instead focus on what I feel is the most powerful aspect of Capturing the Friedmans: The family itself. During the course of making the film, Jarecki was allowed access to video footage that David recorded as a diary of sorts during the trial and while Arnie and Jesse were under house arrest. Hours and hours of footage was filmed of the Friedmans, interacting in what they all know will be their final time all together, and Jarecki masterfully weaves this footage amidst the interviews and documentations of the court proceedings. David’s video diary acts as the backbone of a film made up of claims, opinions, and eyewitness accounts: In a case where we will never know what really happened, here are things that we can at least rest assured did happen.

What exactly takes place in these moments supplies the film with most of its raw intensity; indeed, how would you expect a family to act under such strain act? Certainly one of the most fascinating aspects of the footage is that it is nearly impossible to tell what exactly Arnie is thinking; for a would-be pedophile whose fate is impending, he comes across more weary and embarrassed than angry or afraid. Clearly under pressure and emotional strain, he limits his words and interactions and simply observes in almost passive bemusement as the rest of the family bickers and complains and seemingly falls apart.

The three sons are convinced of their father’s complete innocence, and they adamantly defend him against Elaine, who openly and firmly admits that she honestly doesn’t know whether her husband is guilty or not. The sons call her “crazy,” accuse her of betraying Arnie, and shout bitterly at her from across the room. We can see that they are devoted their father, but we the viewers are able to see without the red glasses and realize that we can’t blame her for having doubts in a man who she thought she knew for three decades before child porn was found in his possession.

Jarecki crosscuts this footage in with interviews of David and Elaine, the former who remains to this day very upset and distant from the latter. Elaine has moved on, but laments that she never felt like she connected with her former husband or their sons: “When they get together, they are like the Marx Brothers,” she says, “and I never fit in with their humor.” This is affirmed, more or less, with additional footage of the high-strung men trying to relax and joke together, and their mother is curiously absent all the while during these attempts at lightheartedness.

The footage unfolds before our eyes like an early Shakespearian tragedy, in which success is merited by who survives, not by what a character gains. With such an emotional connection already weak between Elaine and her sons, it is no wonder that the trial drove a wedge even farther apart between them. It is also no wonder, as Elaine tries to convince Arnold to plead guilty, why David remains so angry with her—he blames her for forcing his father into the prosecution’s submission. On the other hand, as David verbally lashes out at her with such venom and disgust, we also realize that Elaine was only trying to do the best she could and that perhaps David is too blinded by emotion to recognize the turmoil and confusion that Elaine herself was suffering through as well.

The most disturbing sequence in the film also somehow transforms into the most moving. Before Jesse goes to trial, he and his brothers record themselves laughing, goofing off, and quoting Monty Python on the steps of the courtroom. For a nineteen-year old college student about to be convicted for child molestation, these seem like bizarre, downright irreverent acts. But look closer, and compare this footage to the previous footage of stress and heartbreak in the Friedman home: Here are three young men who understand that their lives will never be the same, desperately trying to capture on film as much normalcy and warmth as they can, for as long as they can. This humor is not an act of irrelevance and disrespect, but one of love and desperation.

David’s footage is nearly cinematic on its own, and contains moments of sheer revelation about the dynamics of an outwardly ordinary family under perhaps the greatest imaginable stress. Jarecki could have simply let the footage speak for itself, and he does for the most part, but he also brilliantly fuses it together with his own vision for Capturing the Friedmans: A discussion not of whether or not Arnold or Jesse are innocent, but the use of the subject to cover the consequences of media hype, the sincere but often misguided police, suburban life in America, the effects of mass hysteria, and, of course, the portrait of a family that loves one parent perhaps too much and the other perhaps too little. It’s a seamless blend, in a film that somehow uses the topic of child pornography to paint an honest, sad, but ultimately (and strangely) hopeful portrait of America.

After Capturing the Friedmans, I am now watching Andrew Jarecki’s career with eager curiosity. It has been noted elsewhere that it will be difficult to top this one. Just his first picture, it will go down—indeed, it is already going down—in history as one of the greatest of all American films. This confirms an assertion I once made that the future of American cinema as an art form rests in the documentary, the art house film, and shorts—outlets not widely commercial in which directors truly have to work to earn their living, and must therefore make films out of passion, not because they want viable success. And Capturing the Friedmans is above all a work of dedication, intelligence, and passion. Along with young filmmakers David Gordon Green (Undertow) and Stephen F. Boatright (Outcasts), I now look to Jarecki as the future (and hope) of American cinema, and I’m beginning to believe that it might be in capable hands after all.

Magnolia Pictures presents a film by HBO Documentaries. Directed by Andrew Jarecki. No M.P.A.A. rating, but contains mature subject matter and language. Running time: 107 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: June 13, 2003.