July 4, 2003
By D.K. Holm
Tears of a Clown
CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
There are some films you wish you could know absolutely nothing about before you see them. CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS is one of them. I'm kicking myself for having read Stuart Klawans's review in THE NATION, and a few other reviews or notices before I finally got a chance to see the film itself.
The paradox is, How do you know that you want to see the film unless you know at least a little something about it? And the commercial challenge is, How can a studio convey what the film is about without saying too much? It's a challenge that promoters all too often fail to meet, if they even try. Most studios, but especially Disney, reveal quite a bit, indeed way too much, about a film in their trailers, and all the studios go in for media campaigns, both paid for in advertising and bartered for in magazine coverage, that saturate the market with "spoiler" images and plot details. But then, it doesn't seem to matter. At screenings, the audience still laughs at this or that pratfall — which they must have seen on television a million times — as heartily as if they had never seen the moment before.
Originally, my interest in CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS had been whetted by a rep house operator I know who had seen a tape and described it with just the right balance of enticing details and withheld surprises. His enthusiasm for CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS was infectious, and his appreciation of the movie was partly based on the final inconclusiveness of the film. At the same time, one of FRIEDMANS's "selling points" was that throughout the film revelation after revelation occurs, each one confounding the viewer yet again.
For the purposes of this review, I am going to assume that the reader has also already read too much about the film. But take my word for it, do not read on if you want to enjoy CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS to its fullest. Instead, stop reading and go to see it with only the knowledge that CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS is about a reasonably happy Great Neck, New York family that harbors dark secrets.
Arnold Friedman was a science and music teacher at Bayside High School in Queens who enjoyed a certain measure of success. He won awards for his teaching skills. In the '70s he collaborated with the late Steve Allen, fellow musician, talk show host, and prolific author, on a book about computer skills. Ex-students praised him for his sympathy and teaching ability. He gave piano lessons at home and eventually opened a computer school in the basement of his house.
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With his wife Elaine, Arnold had three sons, David, Seth, and Jesse. Seth Friedman, who later went on to found the magazine FACT SHEET FIVE, declined to participate in CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS. David Friedman, who had been on CANDID CAMERA when he was three years old, grew up to be Silly Billy, a popular clown with a strangely hostile attitude to kids but with tony clients who included Susan Sarandon and Eddie Murphy. Friedman was even profiled by Susan Orlean in THE NEW YORKER, the faux orchid thief failing to glean any hints about dark secrets in Friedman's past. As David Edelstein describes him in a Slate review of CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS, Silly Billy, "who entertained at my daughter's third birthday two years ago … cut quite a figure: a middle-aged Jewish man in baggy overalls and oversized yellow glasses, with no makeup and a sort of haunted sourness. But he was a sensational clown. I'm still in awe of the way he held the attention of 25 clamorous 2- and 3-year-olds, purposely screwing up to earn their scorn and then triumphantly demonstrating his virtuosity. (He was also the best balloon-animal twister I've ever seen.) I'd hire him again in an instant, but there was something peculiar about him. 'Does he even like kids?' we all wondered."
It turns out that David Friedman may have been the one member of his family who didn't. On the day before Thanksgiving in 1987, Arnold Friedman was arrested for possession of child pornography, the climax of a three-year-long sting operation that arose when Friedman ordered a kiddie porn magazine from the Netherlands in 1984 — a magazine he never received because postal agents got it first and set up Friedman for an elaborate entrapment operation.
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Nassau country police, noting with alarm that Friedman had a classroom in his basement, decided to further investigate Friedman. Contacting former and current computer school students, the investigators built a "your word against mine," physical-evidence free case that culminated in the later arrest of Friedman for the sexual molestation of his students. The events that occurred on the night of his arrest, thoroughly covered by the media at the time, were sad, grotesque, and darkly humorous. They included David putting underwear over his head and berating the local TV cameras. But things got worse. Not only did the police haul away Friedman; they also arrested the youngest son, Jesse, as an accomplish.
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As is now well known, wealthy Moviefone.com co-founder Andrew Jarecki originally set out to make a film about Silly Billy, called ''The Children's Entertainer Project' (he had made other short films and directed plays at college before becoming an early dot com millionaire). But unlike Orlean, Jarecki learned that there was a dark, decade-old, and potentially career-destroying family secret in his past. Not only that, but Jarecki also learned that David had videotaped his family during the several months of crisis between arrest and sentencing.
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The title CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS uses multiple meanings of the word "capture." It evokes not only the arrest of the two Friedmans, but also their mania for cataloging themselves on film. In many ways, the Friedman family was very much a clan of the '50s, when the advent of Kodaks and later 8mm and Super8 film allowed families to immortalize themselves with instant memory floggers of dull vacations and family inside jokes. A budding Spielberg or Shyamalan, David also made fiction movies using the equipment (one was called CAPTAIN ZERO AND THE DESTRUCTION RAY). It was a performance-oriented family. Arnold had been a pianist with a mambo band in the '40s and '50s. The kids appear to be quite comfortable showing off in front of the camera.
Strangely, despite all this footage, Arnold is an absence at the center of these home movies, indeed of CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS as a whole. The viewer can speculate that Arnold, tortured by his secret fantasies, was a man so inward, so guarded, so held in check that he became a cipher. In the home movie footage of the Friedman clan yelling at each other in the aftermath of the arrest, Arnold is a lump, a beaten down man with little affect and no charisma. Yet this was the fellow who was able to inspire generations of students, and whose sons (two of them anyway) still revere him as a great man.
Because of these varying qualities, the family dynamic of the Friedmans is fascinating. When the movie begins you are prepared for Elaine, the mother, to emerge as the villain. In fact, as the film goes along, you acquire a deep sympathy for her. She had her own neuroses, but she also lived with a lie for 30 years. Yes, she makes a terrible decision about half way through FRIEDMANS, but at one point or another every member of the Friedman family behaves terribly. It is a deeply discomforting experience to hear David screaming at his mother as he does several times in the home movie footage, just as it is to see him talk to the camera while making a video diary of his thoughts. "If you're not me, you really shouldn't be watching this," he tells the lens, as we lean in to hear and see more. "If you're the police, fuck you!".
Edited by co-producer Richard Hankin, CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS is brilliantly constructed, parceling out both its narrative arc and its tidbits of shocking new information with perceptive cunning. The film obviously harks back to Errol Morris's THE THIN BLUE LINE, and Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's two PARADISE LOST documentaries. One technique that the filmmakers borrow from Morris is to let law enforcement officials basically hang themselves by talking too much. The film also subtly or quietly judges many of the lesser interviewees. One alleged victim of the Friedmans, who asserts that father and son played penile leap frog with the nude kids in the classroom, is photographed in shadows, lazing away on a couch, his pose suggestive of a catamite in Nero's inner circle, undermining the rage he lays claim to.
The larger theme of the film is obviously something along the lines of truth versus reality (the great theme of Shakespeare). Despite the presence of David's camcorder, we still don't know certain things about the family. We never will. Did Arnold do it? Elaine suggests that, though he may not have molested his students, he still may have felt the need to pay for earlier sins (he admitted to having molested the son of a family friend many years earlier). Did Jesse do it? When the film starts and the baby pix of Jesse appear, you think, well, there's a very pretty baby. Did Arnold think the same thing? Did Jesse molest any kids? If not, why did he tearfully, convincingly confess to the acts in a plea bargain? [Jesse blames his lawyer.] Did Arnold molest Jesse? Did Arnold molest his own brother Howard, now — in one of the film's most clever surprises — a gay man living with his male lover on the coast of Oregon. Howard has no memory of the incidents, though Arnold confessed to them in a letter to a journalist.
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Howard goes to great lengths to assert that he has no memory of any abuse from his older brother. Will he "recover" his memory at some point? One of the more interesting things that the film does is call into question police tactics of interrogating "victims" of group molestation, and the sudden recall of victimhood at the hands of their psychological manipulation. CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS is only 107 minutes long, but it could be four hours and still not exhaust the subject's potential.
One of the talking heads in the film is Debbie Nathan, a journalist who has specialized in the national hysteria over satanic cults of child abuse, such as the McMartin case in California. In fact, she wrote an excellent story for the VILLAGE VOICE giving her side of participating in the film, providing many more details about the case (such as the fact that the three kids had stumbled upon dad's kiddie porn stash many years before), and her observations of how the once firmly pro-Arnold Jarecki has slightly tilted his position on his own film in the wake of reviews that have praised its "ambiguity."
Nathan presents a surprisingly sympathetic account of what child molesters are, as well as an hysteria-free account of what they do, based on extensive research. Another VOICE article by Richard Goldstein, about the Pee-Wee Herman and Peter Townsend cases, also challenges the reader's assumptions about what child porn is and what molesters do.
These are difficult issues. I have a number of friends who were molested in childhood. Some are still affected by it. Others have outgrown any pain they may have originally felt. You want to be sensitive to a friend's feelings while at the same time doubting the validity of the epidemic of "recovered memories" that swept the nation in the '80s. As Frederick Crews shows in his brilliant pair of essays, THE MEMORY WARS: FREUD'S LEGACY IN DISPUTE (New York Review Books, 299 pages, $22.95, ISBN 0 940322 04 8), recovered memory is itself founded on the pseudo science of psychoanalysis. A bizarre mix of Freudianism, feminism, and bad clinical practice, all parties to the recovered memory movement, in Crews's words, "share the core tenet of repression — namely, that the mind can shield itself from ugly experiences, thoughts, or feelings by relegating them to a special 'timeless' region where they indefinitely retain a symptom-producing virulence." As Nathan points out in her VOICE article, however, the only kids who came forward with "recovered" memories of Arnold abusing them were the computer school students, whom the police interviewed because they had a master list of all who had ever attended. The piano students were unknown to the police because Friedman didn't keep a list, and none of them have ever come forward to claim victimization.
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Jarecki's film has not been universally hailed as a masterpiece. There are a few green splatters on the Rotten Tomatoes page of reviews for the film. What negative reviewers seem to object to is how the material is manipulated. Indeed, in an interview Jarecki himself admits to regrets over a very misleading portion of the film in which Jesse goes to his sentencing and outside, clowns for the camera (evidence to the cops that he did experience "remorse," although if he did nothing, what's there to regret?). It turns out that the tearful confession before the judge and the clowning took place several weeks apart, though the film presents them as happening on the same day. Jarecki's admission at least explains away what is otherwise an impossible sequence of emotional mood swings. But this is a modest blemish that will be no doubt be cleared up or clarified on the DVD. And if Jarecki, Hankin, and even David Friedman all work in concert with each other, CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS could well be one of the best DVDs ever released. It's already one of the best films of the year.
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