A FAMILY AFFAIR
by
Anne Gilbert

It is not easy to watch Capturing the Friedmans. It is an aggressively depressing tale, and one that is narrated entirely by people who are acting primarily out of self-preservation. What makes the film so captivating, however, is its unabashed realness. The depiction of the collapse of the family unit, as its members are laid bare for the movie camera, makes Capturing the Friedmans an engrossing, fascinating, and distressing film.

Initially investigated for trading in mail-order child pornography, Arnold Friedman, a quiet, meek patriarch adored by his three sons and distant from his wife, was arrested in 1987 for perpetrating countless acts of molestation, rape and sodomy against young boys to whom he taught computer classes in his basement. Rather quickly, the youngest Friedman, Jesse, was brought into the allegations after he was named by several students. But as frenzied and spectacular as the attention swirling around the family once was, it faded over time, as media attention inevitably does, leaving the family in fractured anonymity. This has the side effect that it is legitimately possible that the audience of Capturing the Friedmans are vague on the historical details at best, and are possible entirely oblivious to the history. With this in mind, director Andrew Jarecki succeeds in carefully and slowly unfolding the tale, meting out information and pertinent details with precision and alacrity. As a result, the film feels like a journey, the slow unfolding of events that is made without an agenda or a rush to any particular conclusion.

The film's immediacy and sense of realness is brought home by the breaking up of the standard documentary method of talking-head interviews with footage of the family taken from the Friedman home movies. These two elements combine to depict the brutal and absolute unraveling of the family unit, one that happened not only in their home, in front of the family video camera, but also splashed across the pages of newspapers, amid a sensational, ugly case of child molestation. Because those people involved in both the criminal case and the familial devastation can only look at the events of the downward spiral in retrospect, their impressions are influenced by hindsight and colored by the passing years. The family footage, on the other hand, wields an impressive prescience and an intimate, unyielding notion of truth. The juxtaposition of these two versions of telling the tale creates a portrait of the Friedman family history that is at once unflinching and chaotic.

In contemporary interviews, members of the Friedman family--David, the eldest son, Elaine, the matriarch, and Jesse, the youngest son -- are visibly attempting to reconcile their own memories of the past with the version told in the newspapers (Arnold Friedman died in 1996, and the middle son, Seth, was not interested in participating in this project). The absolute strength of the film, and its unwavering power, is that it never professes to uncover the "truth." There is no truth here -- only stories to be believed or dismissed. Although Jesse maintained his own innocence, and David retained faith in his father and brother, even their personal convictions wavered. Jesse's story, though convincing in its ability to point out the glaring faults in the story woven by the prosecution, changed more than once. The police, likewise, told a different tale at different points of the investigation, at times indicating that Arnold Friedman was a visible pervert, and others claiming that his danger was his ability to seem so innocuous. Additionally, memories were inconsistent from investigator to investigator, some claiming that the alleged victims came forward on their own, while others indicated that the victims simply agreed with the story the police already believed. Nevertheless, the police unearthed some fairly damning evidence against the Friedmans, and the list of alleged victims only grew longer.

In the end, the film does not present two sides to the story, but innumerable versions of the same events, ones colored by time, by conviction, and by self-interest. It is not a question of who is telling the truth; it is more which version you believe. Likewise, the film, in its use of footage from the Friedman home movies, becomes not just a portrait of a family caught in a wrenching public scandal, but one that is violently coming apart at home. In addition to footage from the family as they aged, the Freidmans often left the camera on during its vicious private battles, when Arnold and Jesse were home on bail, before the trial, for instance. It is one of the film's few weaknesses that it does not focus more on this domestic desolation.

Much of the picture's most mesmerizing footage, and most difficult to watch, involves the way this family treats one another when their situation is at its most desperate. The way they interact, the way they know precisely how to go for one another's jugular with little effort, indicates that their self-destruction is not a simple product of their public ordeals. Rather, this was a family on the edge: Elaine is selfish and demanding, Arnold is deferential, and the sons are aggressive and attempt to fight their mother because their father will not. While the domestic drama may not appear, at first glace, to be as incendiary as the public turmoil, it is the more damaging, and it's a shame that this is not explored more within the film. But whatever weaknesses it has are hardly sufficient to diminish the power and quality of Capturing the Friedmans. It is a documentary of rare ability, presenting the quagmire of real-life crises without the promise of discernible truth.

©2003 Anne Gilbert
CineScene