Customer Reviews

Capturing the Friedmans

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The best documentary to be released in recent years (that includes "Farenheit 9/11"), "Capturing The Friedmans" is a powerful, shocking, disturbing, mesmerizing, sad, & ultimately tragic film that haunts you long after the film is over.

Arnold Friedman is an upstanding teacher, who has garnered many awards in his field, a father to three sons, and the head of a seemingly happy family and household, who also teaches piano & computer lessons to young children & teenagers in Great Neck, NY. When he is arrested & brought up on charges of pediphilia, The Friedman family's normal life descends into a nightmarish hell as family members take sides as to whether Arnold is guilty or innocent (the mother, Elaine, despises Arnold keeping his dark secret from her for all these years, while the boys stand behind there dad). The police, obsessed with bringing the elder Friedman to justice, interview all the children that attended the piano & computer classes, and some not all (and under the coaxing of the police and, worst yet, through hypnosis) admit to some form of pediphiliac action taken against them. It gets worse when during some of the interviews Friedman's youngest son, Jesse, pops up supposedly helping his father in some of the acts. The police promptly arrest Jesse and bring him up on charges, also. The media, of course, does not help matters when accusations & allegations are blown out of proportion as the family, as a whole, disintegrates quickly. The outcome is mind blowing to say the least & a great misjustice to a family that should have gotten a fair trial.

Through video, taken by the Friedman's oldest son to document the entire tragedy in hopes of people seeing the true side of this case, & stock footage of the family in happier times, the viewer is hurled into a video collage of a family that once might have been a stand out in the community to a family that is all but a memory housed on VHS tapes, 8mm film & long forgotten photos. The family's demise is a tragic & sad feeling. I got a small knot in my stomach watching this film.

The final question still remains - who is to blame?

There are three factors.

first off, Arnold Friedman because even though he was into pediphilia, he should have had the responsibility to put him being a father figure & teacher first & foremost over anything else, including his secret stash of kiddie porn. Didn't he realize that if he got caught w/ this trash he was looking at jail time? As for his son Jesse, he should have pleaded innocent. The trial may have lasted a few more years, but, in the long run he would have been, possibly, an innocent man.

The police & the Feds should have had a lot more restraint & over all, discreet class over this case. For the case to turn into a circus and free for all is a shame & to grill the children the way they did during the interview, and coming up with no substantial evidence other than the stack of hidden kiddie porn is the classic paranoid case of going above the law & also a classic case of mis-justice (the bonus materials on the second disc are not to be missed).

The parents of the so called victims. After the case broke, in the media and the surrounding area, the parents got together to console one another & attend group therapy. But, how can the children be called victims, when those same parents would pick there son or daughter from whatever class they attended with no bruises, physical scarring of any kind, no tears shed and clothes that were unsoiled and untorn? Even with that said, wouldn't the child come forward to the parent saying that he or she didn't want to go to the class anymore? One of the kids that confessed to being abused & was hypnotized, comes off on screen like the average punk & I didn't believe a word he said. He seemed like the one that needed the most theraputic help out of everyone in the movie!

If he had given up on his dark hobby, I feel that Arnold Friedman would still be happily married, living in Great Neck, New York, living a happy retirement. Sadly, its only a "what if" question.

Making a documentary is much less restricting than fiction. If you make a work of fiction, you are forced to stay within the constructed limits of "believability" which we have concocted, where it is perfectly acceptable to portray sound in space but bad form to make an "evil" person more complex than a Graham cracker.

Capturing the Friedmans is the kind of story that would be impossible to write as fiction. It documents on-screen a conspiracy to accuse and imprison a man without evidence, on the sole basis of pornographic magazines. It gives us home videos of the family while all this is going on, a family that is deteriorating. It gives us villains that spill the beans to us, as bumbling than a space age tyrant (what else should we think of a judge who says "I knew he was guilty before even hearing the case" ?)

The story, ostensibly, concerns the case of one Arnold Friedman, a respected and honoured retired teacher who teaches computer class in the basement of his home, and his wife and three boys. The police finds out that he mailed someone to receive an illegal pornographic magazine. They eventually manage to nail him to rights and investigate his house, finding a pile of child pornography.

This is not the end, however. Using deceptive interrogation techniques (as is so common in such cases), the police gets dozens of kids to testify that they have been molested by Arnold. His youngest son Jesse is also accused. Both are accused of sodomizing more than twenty boys in the basement.

There is such a contrast between the human, sometimes quarreling, Friedmans, and the callous rationalizations of their accusers, that it is hard not to take sides for the family. Furthermore, the evidence is incredibly flimzy : for one thing, we are supposed to believe that boys were getting bloodied in the basement, and no parent ever found out about it for years before the accusations. We even have the audio of one of the police "interrogations", which are a combination of suggestion and intimidation.

It is hard not to see this movie as anything but a powerful indictment of the justice system, and social dynamics in general. Child abuse scares of all stripes are typified here : the witch-hunt atmosphere, the social prejudice, the trumpeted charges. Unfortunately, like most witch-hunts, it does not have a happy ending. A powerful testimony to the suffering of the common man against the system.

The subject of this documentary is unusual and I thought it was interesting that throughout the movie we couldn't really be sure what happened...we couldn't be certain that any admission of guilt had a factual basis. Also, the family's pro-dad anti-mom dynamics were kind of intriguing given the story. But on the whole, I didn't think this was an exceptionally must-see movie, which I had thought it might be from it's great rating here. What drama there is is subtly implied. Dynamics are missing.

This compelling documentary about the Friedman family and a child sexual abuse court case that turned their lives upside down is a heartbreaking peek into the lives of one very disfunctional family. Like most families who have painful secrets they want to suppress, the Friedmans (except for the mother), act as if absolutely nothing is wrong, that the charges are silly and that everything will be cleared up as quickly as a parking ticket. On the evening before the family patriarch, Arnold Friedman, is to begin serving his prison sentence, the family is partying like it's New Year's Eve. And the same holds true for the day on which the son charged as an accomplice, Jesse Friedman, plans to plead guilty in court. The brothers are goofing off on the courthouse lawn!!

Of course we, as objective viewers, realize that all of this behavior is a desperate attempt to avoid dealing with some serious tears in the family fabric. Arnold pleads innocent to molesting boys to whom he had been providing computer classes in his basement, but is it a coincidence that he seems to go to prison with a substantial sense of relief? The boys paint their mother as a demon intent on destroying the family, but it's the mother who comes across as being the most grounded in reality and the only one (besides Arnold himself) who understands the gravity of the family's circumstances. No, these certainly are not the Waltons.

The documentary does a very compelling job of casting doubt on the fact that Arnold and his son were guilty of molesting boys in that computer class. Our sympathies definitely lie with them, until we find out late in the film that they were probably lying to the authorities and, because we as viewers have become so vested in their story, to us. We probably will never know exactly what happened during those classes. Arnold asserts to his dying day that he never molested any of those students, but he does admit to molesting other boys. So how are we supposed to feel? Glad that he receives punishment for past crimes, or angry at the judicial system for fabricating a crime where one didn't exist? It's a complicated set of emotions the film maker leads his audience through, and it makes for a superb documentary.

Grade: A

A well balance, neutral documentary. You'll question the truth. Well done and deserves its prestige.

Capturing the Friedmans is a documentary regarding the father and pedophile Arnold Friedman who pleaded guilty to having sexually abused some of his computer students. The Friedman's lived in a suburban upper-middle class area, Great Neck, outside New York City where the family seemed to live a normal life. However, on Thanksgiving the local police barged in the house to search for evidence to support their sexual abuse case against Arnold Friedman, which turned into a witch hunt of Friedman's as their son Jesse was also accused of the heinous crimes that his father later pleaded guilty to. Capturing the Friedman's displays a bizarre story of how evidence can get twisted when feelings are involved in the process of seeking the truth, but it is up to the audience to determine the truth as they view this film.

The glibbest way to describe "Capturing the Friedmans" may be to liken it to David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" -- an expose of suburban turmoil -- but that wouldn't give you a true idea about how sinister the reality depicted here is.

Imagine a peaceful community in upstate NY, and imagine that normalcy torn asunder when police raid the home of Arnold Friedman, a highly regarded teacher and loving father of three, and find his hidden library of kiddie porn video diaries.

What follows is a harrowing and almost emotionally draining account of police procedures, replete with stunning story telling, mixing family photographs and videos with documentary footage.

But I have a quibble. What really happened isn't all that hard to figure out, it's grippingly captured. It's just that the film deals with it in such a round-about way, teasing us instead of boldly confronting the truth. Too much is left for us to figure out as the director puts on his Objectivity hat and tries to give us all viewpoints fair and square. Being fair doesn't necessarily mean being without an opinion. The filmmakers would have known more than most of us about this, and a more direct statement of that perspective would have been valuable.

However, the crux of this film lies in its unsettlingly intimate portrait of the family as it combusts under social pressure and media frenzy, and for that I highly recommend renting this one out at least once.

Why do so many otherwise intelligent people maintain that life can be understood in simplistic black and white terms, when the truth is so patently obvious: real life is filled with nearly infinite subtle gradations of gray? One reason is that forcing everything to fit a predetermined, predigested view makes life easier, while rendering our complex, confusing, and crazy world at least somewhat more comprehensible, not to mention less scary. Religious fundamentalists and political fanatics have done this for ages. Doubt or confusion for these people is minimized or even eliminated; they know what and what not to do at any given moment, who their friends and enemies are, who and how they are allowed to love, what to eat, what to wear, and ultimately, what will happen to them after they die. It all sounds very comforting, even appealing.

The fascinating, disturbing movie "Capturing the Friedmans" illustrates this phenomenon. In this film, released several months ago, we meet the Friedman family of Great Neck, New York. The father (Arnold) and middle son are charged with multiple acts of rape and sodomy of boys who took computer classes in the Friedman's basement during the 1980s. The title of this movie is perfect, because although the Friedmans may be "captured" -- by eldest son David's video camera and ultimately by the police -- the truth, or at least the reality of what really happened in this case, is never captured with any degree of certainty. Arnold Friedman receives child pornography in the mail, but that doesn't prove that he and his son Jesse are both child rapists.

According to the police, the judge, and most of the Long Island community, the Friedman case is black and white, open and shut, even before the evidence is examined. By popular consensus, Arnold Friedman is no longer the respected and even beloved computer teacher everyone had thought he was, but a depraved and evil monster who must be guilty of these horrible crimes.

In "Capturing the Friedmans," the Friedmans' guilt is determined in the complete absence of physical evidence, with no credible experts or eyewitness testimony, or even a fair trial. Mainly, we have here, at best, questionable "repressed memories" coming from boys under intense and highly biased questioning by the police, as well as tremendous pressure by parents and peers to "remember" something. What we do not have are records of any abuse complaints filed by even one boy's family during the entire time all this rape and sodomy supposedly occurred. Apparently, out of dozens of boys and their families -- hundreds of people total -- nobody noticed anything amiss while all these horrors supposedly were taking place. So much for all that innocent until proven guilty stuff. Details, details.

As the movie points out, both Arnold and Jesse ultimately pleaded guilty, but what does that prove? A fair-minded person, one willing and able to allow for complexity, contradictions, and subtle gradations in life, might understand such pleas in the context of the situation. Great Neck, like much of the United States in the 1980s, was overcome with child sex-abuse witch hunts. Arnold understandably tried to sacrifice himself in to save his beloved son from jail. Meanwhile, Jesse, who was only 18 and an emotional wreck, was under tremendous pressure from the police and his lawyer to cut a deal and to throw himself on the mercy of the court. Given the community's hysteria and the near-impossibility of finding a fair and impartial jury, this may actually have made sense at the time, except for one small detail: Jesse almost certainly was innocent.

Sadly, because they pleaded guilty, the Friedmans never got a hearing before a fair or impartial jury of their peers. Well before that point, the judge, Abbey Bolkan, already had concluded that the Friedmans committed the crimes with which they are charged. As she says in the movie, "There was never a doubt in mind as to their guilt." So much for impartiality. These two are guilty and evil: lock 'em up and throw away the key.

What we have at the end of all this rush to judgment and community hysteria is a family torn apart, a community traumatized, and two possibly (probably?) innocent men's lives ruined. What we do not have at the end of all this is any sense of certainty, truth, justice, or emotional "closure." Perhaps an adherent to black and white thinking, self-righteous moralism, and the drawing of conclusions in the absence of solid evidence, can explain how all this happened in Great Neck, New York in the late 1980s. While they're at it, maybe that same person can also explain how intelligence information was completely distorted in order to justify launching a war against Iraq in early 2003. But for the Friedman family, for American soldiers getting shot at and blown up in Iraq, and for most people who see this movie, such explanations will likely ring hollow.

A film by Andrew Jarecki

This documentary was not what I had expected. I knew that this was a documentary about a family who had been accused of sexually abusing children. That was all I knew about this film, and my expectations were only that this was going to be a difficult film to watch. The structure and the family dynamic were not at all what I expected.

This is the story of the Friedman family, a well to do family living in Great Neck, New York (on Long Island). The family seems to have this compulsive need to videotape everything, so there are snips of their everyday lives on home video, as well as video diaries and interviews they have done with each other. This feels strange, as if something is not right, and then we move into what is not right. Because of the nature of some magazines owned by Arnold (the father) and caught by the police in a sting operation, the police had been investigating what sort of other abuses Arnold might be perpetrating against children. They found evidence and the police went after Arnold. The family saga doesn't stop here, however, because the youngest son, Jesse, is also implicated in the abuse and he is also arrested.

What is fascinating here (and troubling) are both the family dynamic and the question of guilt. To say that the Friedmans have a dysfunctional relationship is an understatement, and the home videos they have shot illustrate this perfectly. There is always a camera on, and it is not the film director, but rather the Friedmans documenting their lives. Nobody seems to be completely well adjusted, and I'm just not sure how much honesty and support I was really seeing inside the family.

The other fascinating (and troubling) thing was the question of guilt. The family, of course, initially starts out by admitting no guilt, but as the movie goes on, we see that perhaps that is not entirely true. The police are working with evidence, so there must be something to be guilty of. The lawyer says that Jesse said one thing, Jesse claims another, the judge is starting with her own assumption, and of course the public believes they are all guilty. But somewhere along the line the actual facts start getting muddled and stories change, new revelations from the key players are brought to light, and what started as a case of black and white has suddenly become very gray.

"Capturing the Friedmans" is a very interesting, well made documentary. When it was over, however, I had more questions than understanding of what actually happened and who is guilty of what. Perhaps that was the point of the film, but while the family gets a small semblance of resolution, the viewer never does.

This is an incredibly powerful movie. Throughout it, the viewer is persuaded and repersuaded. They did it. No they didn't. In the end, one can't be sure. But through the process of witnessing a family go through a charge of sexual abuse, one begins to question: what is dysfunctional, what causes abuse, what kind of evidence is needed to substantiate such a charge, how does one best deal with crimes against children, and where does the truth lie when each person has a different sense of reality. A moving and important film.