Does anyone remember "Auto Focus"? That film, which starred Greg Kinnear as "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane, purported to use Crane's bizarre and sad life to examine sex, lies and image-obsession at the dawn of the video age. "Auto Focus" was an artistic and commercial failure when it was released last year, mostly because Crane came off as a supreme bore. And that was a shame, because its themes were worthy of exploration, especially at a time when self-documentation, sexual titillation and all manner of freakish "real-life" narratives have become the crack cocaine of prime-time programming.
Happily, a smart, gifted and compassionate first-time filmmaker has made a great movie about those issues in telling the story of an unforgettable American family. In "Capturing the Friedmans," documentarian Andrew Jarecki takes viewers into the heart of an anything-but-typical suburban family as it is propelled along a strange, often horrifying journey through a well-meaning but Kafkaesque legal system. Using present-day interviews but relying mostly on the Friedmans' vast archive of family movies and videos, Jarecki eschews the case-building formula most often followed by nonfiction filmmakers. What emerges in "Capturing the Friedmans" isn't the truth as much as its ambiguity and elusiveness.
A suburban family gets caught up in a nightmare of accusations in "Capturing the Friedmans," a documentary that includes some family movies along with new footage.
(Courtesy Of Magnolia Pictures)
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When "Capturing the Friedmans" opens, viewers meet an attractive, appealing family: musician and teacher Arnold Friedman, his wife, Elaine, and their three devoted sons, David, Seth and Jesse. Starting with 8mm films from the 1950s and 1960s, right up to videos taken in the 1980s, the Friedmans were avid home moviemakers; the boys especially liked to fool around with cameras and tape recorders, joking with their father in mock interviews, recording spontaneous performances. The portrait of the Friedmans is initially that of a happy upper-middle-class Jewish family living on Long Island. Then their story begins to take a different turn. In 1987, Arnold was caught trafficking in child pornography, which led officials to suspect him of more serious crimes. On Thanksgiving eve, police arrested Arnold and his youngest son, 18-year-old Jesse, on charges of sexually abusing students Arnold tutored in the basement.
At this point, "Capturing the Friedmans" enters the familiar territory of the hysteria that gripped the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, when several people were convicted of heinous crimes based on the testimony of children who had been hypnotized and otherwise led by prosecutors. But although the science of recovered memory and the prosecutions that hinged on it have since largely been debunked, "Capturing the Friedmans" isn't a predictable miscarriage-of-justice story. Instead, the audience receives competing versions of an ever-shifting truth and, more dramatically, sees the Friedman family fall apart, as Elaine refuses to proclaim her husband's innocence and as exculpatory witnesses fail to materialize. All the while, even during the height of wrenching family confrontations and confessions, the Friedmans kept the video camera going.
Through sensitive, judicious editing of the Friedman home movies, reminiscences of family members (son Seth refused to take part in the film) and interviews with prosecutors, attorneys, postal inspectors and police officers who were involved in their case, Jarecki creates a collage of contradictory observations, opinions and motives. Just when viewers are sure that they know the truth, something surfaces that puts that certainty in doubt. Perhaps the most fascinating character in "Capturing the Friedmans" is Elaine, whose anger at being isolated by her husband and sons comes out with primal fury during the case, and who becomes the boys' verbal punching bag when she refuses to close ranks with them around their father. Is Elaine the most monstrous mother since Medea? Or the victim of a manipulative and abusive family dynamic?
Jarecki never tells us how to answer those or any other questions in "Capturing the Friedmans," which is his towering strength as a filmmaker. With such bizarre, larger-than-life material to work with, it would have been easy for him to draw a caricature of the family, yet another grotesque portrait of suburbia at its most gothic. Instead, Jarecki evinces a more rigorous moral vision, one that focuses on the Friedmans' complicated lives and visions of reality rather than glib notions of guilt or innocence. Few will believe that justice was done after watching "Capturing the Friedmans." But more than outrage, the film leaves behind a sense of mystery about its persistently enigmatic characters and their myriad unresolved questions. Jarecki has created a tour de force of narrative ambiguity, and in doing so has made one of the most honest reality shows ever.
Capturing the Friedmans (107 minutes, at the Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle and the Landmark Bethesda Row) is not rated but contains some strong language and strong thematic material.
