|
Capturing the
Friedmans
review by Cynthia
Fuchs, 13 June 2003
Seattle International Film Festival
2003
Light
of day
Check
the website promoting Capturing the Friedmans and you'll only
begin to get a sense of the film's familiar strangeness. The page
opens as a photo album, amateur snapshots of a family arranged on
each page, tagged with mundane titles: "The Boys,"
"Arnie," "The House," "Jessie." The
pictures themselves document facades, the sort that everyone
conjures for family photo collections. "Me and Arnie,"
Elaine Friedman appears to have written under one of the couple,
young, relaxed, nearly nuzzling in front of their Great Neck, Long
Island home. A shot of a pleasant-faced kid with big glasses and
sticks in hand is labeled, "David on the drums, a musician just
like his father!" Another shot, showing two kids with moppy
dark hair and eyes squinting in the sun, is marked "Jesse grabs
a piggy-back from big brother David." And still another, an
interior is titled, "Arnie's office/inner sanctum -- don't
touch!"
It's
this last that hints at the roiling chaos beneath all these happy
faces and still surfaces. Capturing the Friedmans is, as its
own title suggests, is about capturing this family, in various ways
-- most obviously, in photos, on 8mm film and video. For, as it
turns out, the Friedmans themselves were ruthless self-documenters,
for which director Andrew Jarecki must be mightily grateful even as
he might be appalled.
The
movie is also about capturing them in bad acts, or rather, bad
intentions, or maybe just out of place. It is about the cops coming
after dad Arnold, an award-winning high school teacher, and his
youngest son Jesse (18 at the time of his arrest, the day before
Thanksgiving, 1987). They were accused of sexually and physically
abusing their young students, during computer classes Arnold taught
in their suburban basement at 17 Picadilly Road. And it is also
about the hysteria that captured their community, the cops, the DA's
office, the media, even the Friedmans themselves.
Though
they vowed at first to fight their accusers, father and son ended up
pleading guilty, hoping to earn lesser sentences than they risked
with trials. In fact, they lost everything. Arnold died in prison in
1995, and Jesse was released in 2001, after serving 13 years of a
16-year sentence. In trying to come to a sense of what happened,
Jarecki interviews Elaine and David, Arnold's brother Howie, some
police investigators (one describes the precise wrong way to
question a child, essentially implanting ideas into her mind,
announcing proudly that this was the procedure the department
followed when going house to house during their inquiry) and a judge
(brother Seth declined to be interviewed for the film).
Jarecki
also speaks to several of Arnold's ex-students, who either can't
imagine that such events occurred (hair-pulling, raping,
peanut-butter-smearing, in the classroom in front of other students,
and all without a single bit of physical evidence, ever, over the
years the abuse was supposedly taking place) or one who is filmed in
identity-protecting shadow, and can't be sure, because he was
hypnotized when he came up with his "memories."
In
other words, the film, for all its lack of professed judgment of its
subjects, makes a clear case that Arnold and Jesse were victims --
of neighbors and news media and a judicial system (see also: the
McMartin trial, made into an HBO fiction film starring James Woods).
To frame this argument, Jarecki talks with journalist Debbie Nathan,
who has previously reported on such cases and was contacted by the
Friedmans in 1989, just after they were incarcerated (see her recent
summary of the case in the Village
Voice. She supports the film's contention that the case was
bogus, a function of its historical moment and a tragedy for the
family.
As
grueling as the story is on its own, the film underlines all the
injustice and hypocrisy heaped on the family with frankly
unnecessary manipulations, snapshots of the family on the beach or
in the backyard, transition shots with sentimental music, sprinklers
and trees to set off the unsoiled surfaces that hide secrets and
calamities (if the Friedmans are hiding such secrets, such images
suggest, what else is going on in the burbs?).
Yet,
for all the poignancy such shots Jarecki's access to photos and
exteriors is nothing compared to the other goldmine he stumbled on.
The founder of MovieFone, he sold the company and set out to make a
film, in particular, about children's party clowns. With this
project in mind, he began to interview Silly Billy, that is, David
Friedman, a popular party clown in New York City. Impressed by the
young man's seeming candor as much as his often visible anger,
Jarecki proceeded to ask questions that took them beyond the clown
business, and soon learned the disquieting backstory.
Most
incredibly, David granted access to hours and hours of his own home
movies -- he filmed and taped his family throughout the arrest and
trial period to document his family's implosion and then granted
Jarecki free use of the footage. This is the most devastating aspect
of the film, not David's strenuous defense of his father,
condemnation of Elaine (he blames her for convincing Arnold and
Jesse to plead rather than stand trial), or even his own sense of
guilt, clearly ravaging him -- not for having done anything wrong,
but for having survived the ordeal. His video
"confessionals" are harrowing.
And,
it turns out that Arnold carried his own burden for years before the
arrest -- a pedophile with a stash of magazines discovered by cops
with a search warrant in 1987. He recalls that, following his own
molestation, when he was 13, he abused his 8-year-old brother,
Howard. That Howard has no similar recollection surely complicates
the confession (and brings poor Howard, interviewed as an adult,
nearly to tears). It also lays out the film's most sustained, least
answerable question. What is the truth? And how would you know it if
you saw it?
David's
home videos appear at first look to offer some sort of truth, if
only because they present raw, difficult pain. More acutely and more
completely than could any interview or assembled research, these
scenes -- the Friedmans arguing in the kitchen, over Seder dinner,
in the basement -- render the devastating toll that this revelation
took on them, individually and as an increasingly decrepit unit.
All
sorts of questions emerge in the wake of these sequences, not least
being: why would anyone expose this raw pain to the light of day,
much less the voracious public -- consuming everything from Fear
Factor to jennicam.com, from Anna Nicole Smith to Wildest
Police Chases. That's not to say that a documentary film making
the festival and art house circuit (and winner of the documentary
Grand Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival) will attract
precisely the viewers as Punk'd, but it appeals to the
prevailing collective desire, however disparaged by watchdoggy
pundits or professional critics.
This
isn't to say that such desire is wrong or right or has any
conventional moral valence, only that it is produced and cultivated,
constructed and consumed. David's stated intention in revealing his
family's horrific story is to exonerate his father and brother
(whether or not he means to indict his mother, he surely does), and
the film's effect is to challenge the investigative and official
processes. Much like the promotional website, the film is all about
pictures that seem simultaneously candid and posed, nostalgic and
harsh. Above all, they seem: there's no telling what anyone was
thinking or feeling at any point, for sure.
Most
provocatively, in doing all of these things, Capturing the
Friedmans also undermines its own ostensible project, to find a
truth, to get at a story that makes sense, that explains what
happened. And so, the project becomes much more complicated, dense,
and endless. The film bravely turns in on itself, resolving nothing
and capturing less.
Seattle International Film Festival:
Reviews:
Interviews:
|
|
Directed
by:
Andrew Jarecki
Starring:
Arnold Friedman
Elaine Friedman
David Friedman
Seth Friedman
Jesse Friedman
Howard Friedman
John McDermott
Detective Frances Galasso
Detective Anthony Sgueglia
Rated:
NR - Not Rated
This film has not
been rated.
FULL CREDITS
BUY
VIDEO
RENT
DVD
BUY
MOVIE POSTER |
|
