Thursday, June 26, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: All in the family

Capturing the Friedmans documents a shocking sex-abuse scandal

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Like many great documentaries, Capturing the Friedmans started out quite differently from where it ended up. For his first feature, Andrew Jarecki--better known as the inventor of MovieFone--was filming children's entertainers in New York when he happened upon a clown called Silly Billy, otherwise known as David Friedman. No one was more surprised than Jarecki when he also happened upon one of the most shocking and disquieting sex-abuse scandals ever documented.

In 1987, acting on a tip from the Postal Service, the police descended on the home of Arnold and Elaine Friedman and their three sons--David, Seth and Jesse--in the affluent Long Island suburb of Great Neck. In the basement they found a stack of man-on-boy pornographic magazines, along with a list of young males who had attended computer classes there taught by Arnold, a Columbia-educated teacher, and Jesse. After interviewing dozens of these boys--with the help of extensive intimidation and hypnotically "recovered" memories--a list of allegations was compiled against both Arnold and Jesse, ranging from the vicious (slapping and arm-twisting) to the outlandish (multiple anal penetrations during "games" of naked leapfrog).

Throughout the ensuing indictments and trials, David kept a video diary, ruthlessly filming the disintegration of his family. In one particularly painful scene Arnold, twisted with shame, feebly protests as the boys accuse their mother of failing to support her husband of 33 years with sufficient vigor. And who can blame her? Elaine herself seems unreachable, a sad and oddly passive figure surrounded by snarling men, stunned by an awful awareness. "Arnold liked pictures," she finally admits with the curious naiveté of her generation. "He would look at them and meditate."

By turns shocking and embarrassing, David's relentless filming is a continuous howl of desperation. He needs the camera to be his memory. "This is just between me and me," he insists--and yet he gives the tapes to Jarecki, clearly in the hope of exonerating his father and brother. And Jarecki flexes his considerable creative muscle to come through for him, skillfully weaving after-the-fact interviews with lawyers, prosecutors and alleged victims into the densely ambiguous fabric of the story. With the help of some truly brilliant editing, a picture emerges of stunning contradictions and terrifying improprieties: children who claimed violent rape yet re-enrolled in the classes; a complete absence of physical evidence, even by parents picking the kids up after class; a judge who boasts, "There was never a doubt in my mind they were guilty."

With each new revelation, the truth becomes more elusive. We get no help from Arnold, an admitted pedophile who seems innocent of these particular charges. Throughout, he remains a vague, peripheral figure hovering behind the raging distress of his sons. And at this point the film reveals a depth and complexity as admirable as it is infuriating, as Jarecki picks away at the fragile relationship between truth and memory itself. "There were piles of pornography all over the house in plain view!" claims a scandalized prosecutor, clearly visualizing the raid of the Friedman home. Unfortunately, the police videotape filmed during that raid shows nothing of the kind.

Layered, lurid and profoundly unsettling, Capturing the Friedmans raises so many questions about our culture--and ourselves--that a single viewing can't begin to tease out the tangle of overlapping issues. By the time you emerge, dazed and blinking, from the theater, you will already be making plans to see it again. The Friedmans will have captured you.