Family friction
Capturing the Friedmans is a darkly fascinating film about a family's implosion
Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina that while happy families are all alike, "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Capturing the Friedmans depicts the unique unhappiness of a middle-class Jewish family ruined by a disastrous turn of events. Tragedy both bonds the family together in peculiar ways but also splinters it into irreparable fragments.
The story behind Capturing the Friedmans is almost as fascinating as the film itself. It began as a breezy documentary about clowns in which New York City's most in-demand children's clown, Silly Billy (David Friedman), was featured. A surly middle-aged guy in giant yellow glasses, "Silly" gives credence to every John Wayne Gacy and Emmett Kelly cliche about bitterness and pathos lurking behind the jumbo nose and demented grin.
Only later did filmmaker Andrew Jarecki (who also happens to be the multimillionaire founder of MovieFone) learn that the clown persona was the least interesting aspect of Friedman's family saga.
Jarecki's filmmaking unlocked a Pandora's Box of grotesque family secrets involving Friedman's father, Arnold, the very picture of a dull, nondescript nebbish living in the affluent community of Great Neck, N.Y. In 1987, after a complex police sting operation, Arnold was accused first of possessing child pornography, and then of large-scale molestation of neighborhood children. Arnold, the respectable computer teacher who had instructed dozens of boys in his basement, was taken out of his suburban home in handcuffs along with his youngest son, 18-year-old Jesse, who was accused of being Arnold's accomplice.
David Friedman's job as a happy-happy children's clown hiding a bitter scowl behind greasepaint seemed to encapsulate something unbelievably tragic about the coping mechanisms of this family: In a nutshell, plaster on a grin and fuggedaboutit.
Jarecki goes back and pieces together the court case. He also includes accounts by friends of the Friedmans and some of the alleged victims years later. The interviews shed a great deal of doubt on whether Arnold took his admitted pedophilia as far as molestation in Great Neck (though the film suggests he may have taken it as far in other circumstances).
But Capturing the Friedmans is less interesting as a meditation on whether Arnold did or didn't molest children — ultimately the answer remains elusive.
The truly, darkly fascinating aspect of the film is what happens to the Friedman family after the accusations. Conforming to every film noir cliche about a group of criminals whose shared secret makes them slowly disintegrate, the Friedman household implodes. Already on the rocks, Arnold and Elaine's marriage is the first to go. Once merely clueless, Elaine (who believed her husband just liked to "meditate" while looking at pictures of naked children) turns bitter and appears almost eager to be rid of her husband.
Strangely enough, Arnold's three sons begin to turn on their mother, and Elaine becomes the scapegoat in the family drama.
Most perversely, however, is how we even know all of this dark family psychology.
Arnold was an amateur Super-8 buff and joker who passed that legacy on to his sons. They obsessively recorded unbelievable scenes of raging family disagreements and idiotic clowning on video and audio tape as their father and brother Jesse's trials dragged on.
By recording the bitter arguments, the flippant jokes and Elaine's vilification, the brothers seem pacified by a new "truth" that emerges in which the mother becomes the despised adversary and the father a helpless victim. The act of filming events to construct a more palatable truth transforms a fascinating documentary into a profound one.
Nothing is too sensitive for the family to record, and in an appropriate stroke of fate, even the trial is videotaped — the first time cameras were ever allowed in a Nassau County courtroom.
Capturing the Friedmans never gives a fully satisfying answer to just what went on in the computer room and behind the piano in the Friedmans' bland suburban home. But "capturing" takes on a different connotation in this queasy, disorienting film where truth grows blurry through the lens of a camera.
Did Arnold Friedman methodically rape dozens of neighborhood children over the course of several years in the family's basement? That question will probably never be answered. But the riddle of Capturing the Friedmans is concerned with more troubling notions of truth and fiction. What Jarecki powerfully conveys is how a family can think, in its countless videotaped confessions and arguments, that it is recording the truth. What Jarecki shows us is that the Friedmans have not captured the truth in those countless videotapes, only themselves.