Capturing The Friedmans

What really happened to the Friedmans?

By John Anderson | STAFF WRITER

May 30, 2003

(NR). Reprise of a late '80s Great Neck child sex-abuse case is deeply troubling, thrillingly cinematic, aptly enigmatic. With David, Jesse, Elaine and Arnold Friedman. Directed by Andrew Jarecki. 1:47 (adult content, language). At area theaters.

Ah, the '80s: Greed was a virtue, rap was music, objective reality was on the ropes. Society, justifiably confused, found in child abductions and sex abuse an oasis of outrage: a violation it could attack without fear of contradiction, and without ever having to explain itself.

It did, in the end, have to explain itself to some degree, but not before consequences both good and bad: a healthy increase in the awareness of heinous crimes and the reporting of same, for instance. And a witch-hunt mentality that resulted in several celebrated cases of gross injustice and professional malpractice. The McMartin case in California, for one. The Kelly Michaels case in New Jersey, for another.

Whether the case against Arnold Friedman - award-winning school teacher, computer instructor, admitted pedophile - fits in that latter category is the question posed by "Capturing the Friedmans," Andrew Jarecki's scathing exploration of the Great Neck child sex-abuse case and a movie that is in turn surgical laser and blunt instrument. Having seen "Friedmans" in January at the Sundance Film Festival - where it was selected best American documentary - a colleague told me she was convinced that the movie's audiences would conclude "something happened" in Great Neck during Friedman's after-school computer classes. Others, myself included, have come, via the film, to the precisely opposite opinion: that the case against Friedman - and his son Jesse, who was indicted with his father and served 13 years in prison - was largely a matter of law-enforcement overkill and communitywide hysteria.

I don't write this to make an argument either way, but rather to point up the major coup of Jarecki's film. Lack of concrete perspective is usually not considered a major asset in documentary filmmaking. But by not making any case, "Friedmans" makes its own. The flaw of human perception - the real theme of the film, the one thing it firmly establishes - is that people are not only capable of seeing what they want to see, but of embracing what they fear the most.

"Friedmans" is a film that can only be watched the same way once, because Jarecki's strategy is to present us with testimony and evidence by people who seem to believe what they're saying and then have that evidence abruptly dismissed by others who firmly believe what they are saying. Just when you think you know what's going on - which was precisely the experience so many had during the investigation, prosecution and reporting of the Friedman case - Jarecki takes you in the opposite direction. The end result is that a firm conviction is a dangerous thing.

Jarecki set out to make his second film - his first was a short called "Swimming" that also played at Sundance - about Manhattan birthday clowns. The most successful of these is/was David Friedman, Arnold's eldest son and brother to Jesse and Seth (Seth refused to participate in Jarecki's film). What Jarecki discovered during the interview process was that David had a very interesting family. And hours of videotape of them.

Camcorders were relatively new; the Friedmans had a penchant for self-portraiture even at their most desperate and David gave Jarecki the tapes. It's the integration of them into the story that makes "Friedmans" so masterful. Dreamy sequences of al fresco Great Neck are interwoven with the case's various talking heads - who include detectives, journalist Debbie Nathan, prosecutors, defense laywers and other alleged victims - the resulting tone being one of verite unreality. But it's the footage of the family - unhinged by pursuit, notoriety and their already disturbed dynamics - that gives the movie its power. And its considerable pathos.

Jarecki has taken an impossible subject, and subjects, and made a movie that works as crime thriller, social document and, occasionally, surrealist comedy. It's hard to imagine minds not being changed by "Capturing the Friedmans" simply because you can't watch the film without entertaining the notion of changing your mind.