Arnold and Elaine Friedman were a seemingly typical couple living in Great Neck, NY, in the 1980s. Arnold was an outgoing and well-liked schoolteacher with an interest in electronics who also ran a private computer school out of their home. Elaine, a reserved but caring woman, helped look after the couple's three sons, Jesse, Seth, and David. All appeared to be happy in their lives until November 1987, when police raided the Friedman home after Arnold and Jesse were accused of multiple counts of child molestation. A search revealed that Arnold owned a sizable collection of child pornography, and he confessed to some of the charges placed against him; Jesse, however, firmly insisted he was innocent. As the investigation against the Friedmans went on, public opinion regarding the case became more and more heated, but not all of the testimony against Arnold and Jesse matched up, and some began to wonder just how many of the charges filed against the family had merit. Remarkably enough, in the midst of these crises which threatened to destroy the family from within, the Friedmans continued to take part in one of their favorite pastimes -- shooting home videos of their day-to-day lives, offering a fly-on-the-wall look at a family struggling (and often failing) to hold themselves together in the wake of unthinkable accusations. Filmmaker Andrew Jarecki not only documented the legal and emotional struggles of the Friedman family with his own cameras, but was given access to the family's archive of home videos, and the result was Capturing the Friedmans, a documentary which keeps its primary focus on the Friedman family while also investigating the merits or faults in the charges levied against them. Capturing the Friedmans received an enthusiastic reception in its screening at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review by All Movie Guide
All Movie Guide
liked it.
Andrew Jarecki's debut feature is a devastating portrait of the collapse of an American family, not to mention a fascinating meditation on film, memory, and truth. Jarecki's project originally started out as a documentary on David Friedman, Manhattan's most popular party clown. As he dug deeper into his subject, however, Jarecki struck gold, unearthing the messy pedophilia scandal that destroyed the Friedman family. Jarecki's serendipity did not end there: In addition to being a compelling subject, the Friedmans turned out to have been inveterate home-video hounds. Comprised of old Friedman footage, news clips from the period, and recent interviews with the family, the movie proves to be a remarkable work of assemblage. Jarecki reconstructs the events that led to the imprisonment of Arnold, the Friedmans' patriarch, and Jesse, one of the three Friedman boys, on sexual abuse charges. Rummaging through the family's attic, Jarecki cobbles together an incisive document that suggests that the two were victims of a media feeding frenzy and mass hysteria in their Great Neck, NY, community. No less an act of distortion is David's father worship. Years after the scandal, the eldest of the Friedman sons still remains convinced of his father's decency -- despite Arnold's undisputed possession of child pornography and his own admission that he had committed pedophilia twice before (but never in Great Neck). A study of the American obsession with personal drama and the examined life, Capturing the Friedmans also emerges as a
Rashomon-like rumination on the slippery nature of truth. The closer Jarecki looks, it seems, the less we see. While Jarecki's manipulative editing begs the question of just how much of that obscurity is the director's work, the awful drama of the Freidmans' downfall is unmistakably genuine. Jarecki's stabs at metaphysical import may be transparent at times, but it hardly mars the emotional impact of this heartbreaking film. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide