Capturing the Friedmans not to be Missed

Are we in a documentary heyday? From Supersize Me to the Fog of War to the filmic opines of Michael Moore, documentary-as-entertainment has exploded in the 21st Century.

Documentary titles fill the video rental shelves alongside the latest blockbusters, giving the slightly geeky-looking, social-commentating auters a stroll down the red carpet with all the Hollywood glitteratti, some of them stars in their own right. Indeed, the artform of celluloid truth-telling has come a long way since the days when Reefer Madness purported to "inform" the masses at the Saturday Matinee.

In this surge of popular documentaries over the last three or four years, you may have missed Capturing the Friedmans.

Andrew Jarecki's film of a Long Island family's unraveling at the hands of moral impropriety got plenty of bookings (as far as documentaries go) and a steady heap of accolades. But its box-office take of less than $3 million makes it a good bet you haven't seen it.

You should change that.

Capturing the Friedmans mixes home video and super 8 clips of the Freidman family with footage shot by Jarecki in unfolding a true story that is instantly as compelling as it is shocking. The film opens innocuously enough as we become acquainted with a perfectly normal, if slightly nebbishy Jewish family living in the upper middle class enclave of Great Neck, New York.

Science teacher, Arnold Freidman, and his wife, Elaine, seem to have done a fine job of raising three boys - David, Seth and Jesse - into energetic and witty adults. Though not a picture of perfection, the Friedmans cast a shadow of suburban contentment, a glimmer of the American dream as they rollick on the beach in the '60s and entertain each other with goofball familial schtick in the '70s.

The '80s, not by mere contrast, would turn out much worse for the Friedmans.

In 1987, police found a stash of child pornography in Arnold's home office, leading investigators to a barrage of allegations brought on by Friedman's computer class students. Not only is Arnold implicated in the most disturbing of molestation charges, but his 19 year old son, Jesse, is too.

Taken into custody before a media flurry, Arnold and Jesse only become aware of how serious the allegations against them are after the judge sets a million dollar bond at their bail hearing. And there begins a desperate struggle to save themselves from years (if not an entire life) in prison and a branding as the most heinous type of criminal in American society.

Like all documentaries, Capturing the Friedmans has an unavoidable bias, the nature of which becomes clear about half way through the movie. But Andrew Jarecki does an outstanding job of letting the facts speak for themselves, juxtaposing them in such a way that the viewer is taken on a rollercoaster of emotion over belief in Arnold's and Jesse's guilt or innocence. Jarecki's narrative grips you by triggering new questions at the precise moment older ones are answered.

We are never 100% certain what happened between Arnold, Jesse and the computer students, but it's a good bet that no one, Jarecki included - along with David, Seth and Elaine Friedman and any one of the former students - knows entirely what happened. Nobody but Jesse.

Perhaps the greatest achievement in piecing together this film is the use of home video shot mostly by David Friedman in the midst of his family coming unglued. With Arnold and Jesse home awaiting their trials, the Friedmans try to function as the same, goofy, fun-loving family they always were, only now their antics are interspersed with tense debates over defense strategy.

Through all of this, Arnold Friedman is barely audible. His inner turmoil is palpable - all the more so retrospectively when it comes to light during his prison stay that his pedophilia had indeed given way to criminality at some point. The extent of which is never known.

But in editing the home video footage, Jarecki gives us a moment when the entire family is gathered around the dining room table. Arnold is the focus of the shot as the family again debates around him. He is the eye of the storm, but he is not so much calm as petrified.

The shot dissolves to much later in the evening as the rest of the family stands and leaves the table, Arnold barely moves from his position. He is a man who has given up on himself and is perhaps riddled with guilt, but ultimately hatches a plan to save his accused son.

Capturing the Friedmans has two and a half hours of special features on a separate DVD. The segments include an interview with the director by Charlie Rose; confrontations between some of the film's principals at the New York premiere which, again, inspire point-of-view shifts; an original short documentary on David Friedman's career as children's party clown, Silly Billy; profiles of each of the Friedmans including several updates on Jesse after his release from prison; and a film commentary that invites even more perspective changes.

In all, 5 and a half hours of information devoted to a spellbinding true story. It is possible to sit through it all at once and want even more when you are through.

In this month in which the Michael Jackson trial comes to a close, the Friedman case offers a stunning contrast to the Santa Maria spectacle.

Perpetrated in an era when child-sex-ring investigations bordered on witchhunts, one wonders if the pendulum of justice has swung the other way toward leniency. Jackson, despite so much testimony and suspicion to the contrary, may never set foot in prison, while a 36 year-old man in New York City wears a low-jack, reports to a probation officer, registers as a sex offender and is haunted by thirteen years of incarceration for something he might very well never have done.

This film gets an A.