Capturing the Friedmans

Programme Notes

Review by Peter Bradshaw
Friday April 9, 2004
The Guardian [Read Full Review Here]

Andrew Jarecki's compelling and horrifying documentary reminded me of the moment in Portnoy's Complaint when young Alex Portnoy imagines his father confessing to sexual misdemeanours: "Come, someone, anyone, find me out and condemn me - I did the most terrible thing you can think of. Please catch me, incarcerate me, before God forbid I get away with it completely!"

Poor Mr Portnoy was only suspected of having an affair. Arnold Friedman, the mute and hangdog protagonist of this movie, is accused of something far, far worse. But his tragic self-reproach, and refusal to defend himself, is very similar. As his wife Elaine coldly puts it: "He had a need to confess. And a need to go to jail."

The film is a study of transgression and lifelong denial that is so disturbingly intimate it's all but unwatchable. The most incredible thing, among so many incredible things, is that Jarecki only set out to direct a modest movie about the son, David Friedman, a middle-aged man who makes a living as a New York children's-party clown, capering about Manhattan apartments in baggy trousers.

But the director came to discover that his subject's father Arnold and brother Jesse had been co-defendants in one of America's most sensational child-abuse cases, and that the family had a vast archive of home movie Super-8 reels and videotapes showing their life disintegrating during the trial. The tears, the screaming, the stunned silences - a family breakdown, live on camera. For a documentary-maker, that must have been like going potholing in Cumbria and stumbling on Tutankhamen's tomb.

Arnold Friedman was a well-liked teacher in a comfortable Jewish American household, married with three boisterous sons, who gave computer lessons for local kids in his home in Long Island, with his boy Jesse as an assistant.

In the mid-1980s, the postal service intercepted a child-porn magazine sent to his address; a search of his house uncovered a huge stash of this material, together with what appeared to be a lewd computer graphic.

From there, zealous cops interviewed all Friedman's pupils. Their tough, leading questions induced a Salem atmosphere of hysteria in this close-knit community, and Arnold and Jesse found themselves charged with sexual assault of children with no proof other than the circumstantial evidence of the porn and the highly disputable testimony of the children themselves, some of it induced through hypnosis and "recovered memory" techniques.

But did Arnold and Jesse do it? Did they do some of it? It certainly looks as though a not-guilty plea and a trial might have got them off on "reasonable doubt". But poor Arnold, stunned by shame and probably given bad advice by his slimy lawyer, just slumped and pleaded guilty - to his wife's rage - claiming it would save Jesse. Jesse, however, wound up getting charged and he pleaded guilty, too, to lessen his own sentence.

The boys are screechingly, jabberingly insistent to this day on the innocence of father and son, despite this tactical guilty plea. But was their insistence on this doomed strategy and subsequent obsession with their tragic innocence a giant denial mechanism to save them thinking about their father's paedophilia? Whatever the murky truth, this is a movie about being in denial, about the biggest, smelliest elephant in the living room that they can't talk about.

When Elaine was shown the porn, she went into a state of hysterical blindness: "I didn't see it. My eyes were in the right direction, but I saw nothing." Later she says primly: "He would look on these pictures and meditate." My guess is he would meditate several times a day.
The most extraordinary thing is the way they distract themselves by clowning around in front of their home-movie camera, a habit inculcated in them by their father in happier times. Even on the night of Jesse's imprisonment, they're fooling around, doing wacky dances, acting out Monty Python sketches for the video. It's as if they're making their own reality-TV documentary to prove to themselves how fundamentally wholesome they really are.

Jarecki has compared these tapes to The Osbournes, and weirdly, as in that programme, one family member refused to take part in this documentary: Seth, who seems to have done at least some of the original home-camerawork.

The act of filming is a part of the dysfunction, as they compulsively record the rows, the violent confrontations (largely showing the sons' rage at the mother's failure to support Arnold) and the repeated displays of redemptive comic hijinks.
Interestingly, Jarecki leaves this subject unexamined. There are no questions about when they got the camera, whose was it, who got to do most of the filming, did they review their tapes during the trial, etc. Maybe it's because this material is Jarecki's treasure-trove, and if filming is a neurotic, obsessive-compulsive activity, Jarecki is effectively complicit in it.

Capturing the Friedmans does not take sides; it does not present itself as a case for the defence. It shows that Friedman was a lifelong child-porn addict with paedophile tendencies, while also indicating that the assault convictions were as unsafe as they could possibly be. But neither does it indulge in any insidious relativist stuff about the objective truth not actually existing at all. It's just that within families, witnesses to the truth are so compromised, and have such a vested interest in looking the other way, that the truth is all but impossible to get at.
The movie lifts the lid on this seething cauldron of unspoken, unspeakable shame, takes a good long peep within and then drops the lid again with a clang. It shows how the happiest families can live with their own secrets for years; the Friedman family nursed their own festering, ghastly shame and the shock of its revelation led to disproportionate catastrophe. The effects were devastating. And now the effects on us, the audience, are pretty devastating, too.

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