Family Affair
I purposely avoided reading anything about Capturing the Friedmans before seeing the film, which has been no easy task. Andrew Jarecki’s documentary, about a Great Neck, New York, family torn asunder in the late 1980s by allegations of kiddie-porn possession and the horrific sexual abuse of numerous children, has been the subject of much backslapping and hand-wringing since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Certainly its praise is deserved: Capturing the Friedmans ranks among the most harrowing and heartbreaking films ever made about the destruction of an American family, this one by forces external (hysterical cops and prosecutors, scandal-mongering media) and from within (a wife who believes her husband guilty of inexplicable crimes, sons defiantly — perhaps blindly — protecting their father).
But at its core, Jarecki’s masterpiece is a mystery, and to read too much about it before witnessing the copious documentation of the crimes Arnold Friedman and son Jesse were accused of — the Friedmans were videotape fetishists long before most Americans began pointing their own camcorders at their navels — dispels some of the movie’s tension. You will want to blame someone for what occurs onscreen, but do not let a stranger make your decision for you. Read on if you must, but see the movie and decide for yourself whether Arnold was a monster or merely a disturbed man and whether Jesse was his willing accomplice or just a kid in the wrong house at the wrong time. Jarecki does not judge but instead leaves only tragic clues for us to ponder.
His film began as a short about New York City kiddie-party entertainers, among whom David Friedman, the eldest son of Arnold and Elaine Friedman, remains the top clown. But Jarecki shifted his focus when David began dropping clues about a tragic family secret, which, from Thanksgiving 1987 through the spring of ’88, had actually been big and inescapable news in the affluent New York suburb. Then-56-year-old Arnold Friedman, a beloved and award-winning schoolteacher, was busted for sending and receiving magazines in which young boys were pictured engaging in sex acts. Prosecutors also discovered that Arnold was teaching computer classes in the house and began contacting students, some of whom said that Arnold and then-eighteen-year-old Jesse, the youngest son, had raped them. There was no physical evidence, only the testimony of students, some of whom would later insist they said what they believed the cops wanted to hear.
Jarecki gives ample time for prosecutors to recount their case, for now-grown students to tell what may or may not have happened and for Jesse, David and Elaine to tell their sides of the story. But the movie is far more than a glossy episode of Dateline. The Friedmans put so much of their lives on film that we’re witnesses to the birth and death of a family. Arnold captured the family in good times, but it was David who caught all the ugliness on camera — so, as he says later, he could witness the dissolution of the Friedmans without actually having to remember it. David even allows Jarecki access to his bitter, expletive-laden, breakdown-inducing video diaries made in the late ’80s.
Jarecki cheats a little toward the end, showing us only very late the longtime partner of Arnold’s brother Howard — the brother Arnold says he raped when the two were kids sharing a bed. It’s one more blank we’re left to fill in: Was Arnold being punished for being a closeted homosexual, unlike his younger sibling? Then again, what’s one more question heaped upon the dozens we’re forced to confront by this harrowing, tragic movie? Especially when it provides not a single answer.
