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CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS review

There’s all sorts of emotions that you commonly feel while going to see movies over the years. Frustration probably being the most common along with happiness. Typically films seek to make you laugh, cry, cheer, feel excited, exhilarated and on a good day… enlightened. Too often, they leave you feeling bored, indifferent or even… asleep.

CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS did none of these things to me. Instead, it made me furious, angry, disturbed and motivated to spend hours with friends discussing the latent hypocrisy and danger lurking a quarter inch beneath the surface of our culture just waiting for a ember to flare it to full deadly incineration mode.

Most critics that have seen CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS agree that it is the best documentary they’ve seen this year. AICN’s own Vern is who first brought it to my attention during Seattle’s International Film Festival. A film about a family, charges of child pornography and child molestation, a teacher, a father, a family of brothers, a community unhinged, a conspiracy, a hysteria and a profoundly sad clown.

The movie begins by introducing us to the Friedman family through interviews, home video and what you see is a happy family. A seemingly normal middleclass Jewish family living in a suburbia very reminiscent of the Spielberg suburbia we all grew up knowing.

Imagine watching CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, but instead of Roy Neary seeing alien spacecraft dancing across the sky, then coming home to uproot his family to see something better than Goofy Golf, imagine if that night the police came barging into the Neary household, and found a stash of Kiddie Porn magazines behind the piano in his office and suddenly… the husband, the father was a pedophile.

Oh… but it doesn’t stop there. Oh no. You see, this isn’t some work of fiction, some bit of undigested gravy in a screenwriter’s mind… this has all the sick and twisted turns of reality. You see, instead of it being some fictionalized character on a screen, a man playing at being a father, it is a father… Arnold Friedman. A piano teacher, a computer teacher… the funny father of three grown sons and seemingly happily married man.

Seems every kid in the community knew Arnold Friedman… He was the Computer teacher in the era of the SuperPet… when computers were something magical and every kid watching WARGAMES and TRON knew it was the future. When this man is named PEDOPHILE – the community, the police… it explodes. Here’s a man whose job made him have close contact with mainly young boys. From the magazines it grew to accusations of child molestation. From there, it turned into Rape orgies with bizarre sex acts like anal entry leapfrog. His youngest son, Jesse Friedman was also accused of taking part in the Rape Orgies. Therapists helped kids “find” memories, investigators interrogate kids with leading questions. A community becomes unhinged. A family is assaulted, torn asunder and through it all… the eldest son, David Friedman, is videotaping it all… The family arguments, his own video diary as he confesses his feelings circa the eighties, as he’s coming to grips with his family just destroyed.

Watching the kids HATE their mother, her hate them, them all blame one another, turn on one another, hate the cops, hate their father, love their father, mother, each other. This is not an easy film to watch. It isn’t easy to even think about afterwards, but at the same time… it is impossible to look away or not be captivated.

The second someone has Kiddie porn, they are scum. The second they’re accused forcibly having sex with children… KILL. This film takes those feelings and turns them every which way. The images of this family kill you. Watching them on the eve of their father’s incarceration singing, joking, dancing and laughing… I still don’t know what to think… or how to process that. Outside the courthouse before the younger brother’s trial as they joke and play and knowing… knowing what’s about to happen… its just… shocking.

Watching police officers and detectives LIE on camera and state things absolutely contradictory to their own photographic evidence. A complete and utter lack of medical evidence. Lawyers… bad lawyers… and then there is the mother.

The mother. The mother might be the single most complicated character I’ve ever seen on film. A woman that has 3 kids and from all accounts a happy marriage, seemingly turn upon the whole family… BUT THEN, from her side there’s years of complications, post-incident situations that come into play and at the end you get the feeling of freedom and fulfillment for her. That this whole incident freed her of a chained and miserable life… BUT at the cost of her family and children.

Like I said, complicated. I’m not giving you the details, simply because as they unfold… they pack so much emotional power.

There is one moment in the film where I actually wanted to kill a character on the screen. For real. I won’t say who or where… I’ll let you find your own person to express your furor on, and different people will gravitate to different people in this film. The movie doesn’t answer the mystery it lays out. It only shows you that there was a great deal of reasonable doubt and corruption.

Who did what? I couldn’t say.

All I know is that while CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS, director Andrew Jarecki caught something intangible and evil on film. Something corrupt, something festering and something wrong.

I can’t recommend this movie to everyone… I can’t even say I like it. I don’t even know how I feel about myself for having seen it, except that it is the sort of film that reaffirms one’s belief in questioning authority. It is as if the Friedmans’ lives were a Kafka-esque Spielberg like story of suburbia as told by Oliver Stone.

Simply… an American nightmare.

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