Capturing The Friedmans
Directed by Andrew Jarecki

The subject of child molestation is peripheral to the central appeal of the 2003 documentary, Capturing the Friedmans, which has been released by HBO Video in an excellent two-platter set (92315, $30).  The topic is obviously one that turns people off, but the filmmakers are cognizant of that and avoid getting caught up in it in a way that would be alienating.  Instead, the film is a terrific breakdown of the illusions of suburban life and tells a riveting story of the witch hunting that can follow the hysteria involving molestation cases, to the point where justice is ill served by the law enforcement process. 

The case the 108-minute film examines took place on Long Island in the late Eighties.  A former schoolteacher was accused of molesting children in a computer class he held in his house, and regardless of whether or not he actually committed that crime, he was clearly deserving of the punishment he received for other crimes of a similar nature that he had gotten away with in the past.  One of his teenaged sons, however, was also charged, and the validity of his guilt was far more ambiguous—the film pretty much leans toward him having been wrongfully convicted. 

What makes the film exceptional, and perhaps prophetic in its design, is that the family had always been big on home movies—with sound—and when the charges came down the eldest son, who had been away at college and was not accused, obtained a video camera and shot everything that went on in his house—the arguments, the anxiety, the emotional compartmentalization, the legal strategies, the attempts at retaining the family rituals that were once enjoyed, etc.  What the director, Andrew Jarecki, did, was to take that raw material and place it in a reasonably objective context, doing some standard reporter work to show the other sides of the case and the public hysteria that accompanied it.  The ubiquity of video cameras is, even today, still in its infancy, and as the materials they record become available to filmmakers in the future, one of the models for their utilization will clearly be Jarecki’s work on Capturing the Friedmans.  The characters—who are introduced in the opening credits of the film as if they were cast members—are richly developed and explored, so that they become more vividly presented than any fictional dramatic characters could be.  Yet they are all ciphers, too, and part of what makes the film so compelling is what you can’t see about them, what hasn’t been recorded.  You search for clues in every shot.

And DVDs are the greatest thing to happen to documentaries since the invention of the camera.  A good DVD preserves the original design of a documentary, but embellishes its manifesto.  The film wasn’t so much about the case as it was about the affect the case had on the accused family, both the guilty and the innocent, but to achieve its purpose within the time restrictions of a feature film, some of the complexities of reality—such as the fact that several of the son’s friends were also indicted—had to be left out.  This, in turn, caused some critics to call the validity of the entire film into question.  The DVD, however, includes the original material about that aspect of the case (which would not have been excised if the film had been allowed a lengthier running time and a wider thematic focus) and the arguments surrounding the topic after the film premiered. 

The film appears on the first platter, and its addendum, on the second platter, is just as stimulating and intellectually entertaining.  It not only widens the film’s coverage of its topic, but it uses the film as a text to raise the level of examination of its content.  In the most bizarre and fascinating supplementary feature, on two clips that run 16 minutes in total, the participants in the film—not only the family and their lawyers, but virtually all of the individuals interviewed within the movie who worked for the justice system—attend two premiere screenings, and begin arguing about the film and its merits in discussions afterward.  That some of the individuals, such as the retired judge, attend both screenings feels particularly odd, as if they, too, were movie stars of some sort.

The film is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback.  Some of the source material used within the film is technically compromised by masking for the wider aspect ratio, but adverse effects from this trimming are insignificant.  The picture is solid and crisp, but while the presentation of the feature is free of artifacting errors, the supplementary footage is not so carefully rendered and is subject to occasional displacement flaws and other irregularities.  The stereo surround sound delivers an effective dichotomy between the monophonic audio of the home movies and the dimensional narration, and features a serviceable musical score by Andrea Morricone, who is profiled in a 7-minute featurette on the second platter.  There are optional English, French and Spanish subtitles, and a trailer is also included.

Jarecki and editor Richard Hankin supply a commentary track, talking about how they got involved with the film, how they managed to collect the footage they collected, what they think of the various participants (“When we were making the film, for most of that time, [the convicted son] was in prison, and he was very anxious for us to reach out and locate as many of the former computer students as we could find because he was confident that once we found them and could talk to them that a number of them would recant their stories, which is exactly what ended up happening.  While I always maintained a healthy skepticism about what anyone in the film told me, it gave me a lot of confidence that [the son] was so adamant about our trying to find out as much as we could, and he never seemed to me to be afraid of anything we would uncover in our investigation.”), and how they experimented with different strategies in the film’s structure, before finding the one that presented the strongest, most involving narrative.

The amount of what appears to be deleted footage from the film presented on the second platter totals about 46 minutes, and after you’ve watched the movie, you are absorbed by every frame of it.  The segments are spread out under various groupings and sub-groupings, but there is a logical design to the menu so that if you move through it methodically, you are unlikely to miss anything.  The most chilling segment is a minute-long piece about the father’s private confession, which underscores his innocence to most of the charges while at the same time verifies the righteousness of his conviction (he essentially states, with personal knowledge, that pedophiles do not act in the manner he was accused of acting). 

There are two segments, totaling 12 minutes, that follow up on the life of the convicted son, compiled after the film was completed, and there is a 6-minute segment in which the filmmakers and family members go over the questions they are most commonly confronted with regarding the film.  Jarecki also sits for a 19-minute interview with Charlie Rose, and while the talk is intelligent, it is mostly promotional in nature.  On DVD-ROM, there is a replication of the father’s fifteen-page autobiography, in which he goes over the charges and the many aspects of his life that led to his arrest.  There is five-page replication of an inventory of the pornographic magazines and other items seized from his house, a psychology journal report upon the case that is ridden with typographical errors, and several other minor documents.  (Nowhere on the DVD is any medical evidence presented, and press reports after the DVD was released suggest that Jarecki failed to interview several victims.)

Finally, Jarecki first became aware of the Friedman case when he was making a short documentary about New York City birthday clowns, primarily because the most sought-after clown in the city is the eldest son, David Friedman.  That 20-minute film, Just a Clown, has also been included on the second platter.  Not only does it show an entirely different side of David Friedman than the far more emotionally precarious individual depicted in the Friedmans film, but the DVD serves as much as a stunning addendum to it as it serves as a more lighthearted addendum to the film, in each case demonstrating that life goes on after tragedy.

 

The Review Vault
The Best of 2003

- by Douglas Pratt

 

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