Also this issue:

Deadly Passions
Guy Maddin on his sensual, threatening Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.
-Sam Adams

Under Arrest
Ron Shelton’s anticop movie cop movie.
-Cindy Fuchs

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

June 12-18, 2003

movies

Bad Faith

Friedmans under glass: Parents Arnold and Elaine with sons (l-r) Jesse, David and Seth.

The shoddy Capturing the Friedmans betrays its already beleaguered subjects.

by Sam Adams

In documentaries, ethics is a matter of aesthetics, which is to say even the most well-meaning doc can be brought down by a director who doesn’t have the skill to present a fair, humane portrait. That’s not to say the good intentions of Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans are indisputable -- they’re not. It’s just that it’s hard to tell whether Friedmans’ distorted, distasteful vision is a result of bad faith or bad art.

Jarecki, whose background includes co-founding Moviefone and writing the theme song to Felicity, but only a single previous short film, set out to make a movie about children's entertainers, one of whom was David Friedman, who as "Silly Billy" was profiled in The New Yorker as the most successful birthday clown in New York City. But Jarecki stumbled onto juicer stuff: Friedman's father, Arnold, a schoolteacher in the affluent Great Neck community on Long Island, and his younger brother, Jesse, had been jailed for molesting dozens of young boys, students in Arnold's home-taught computer classes. And, lucky break, the family as a whole and David in particular had an obsessive, not to say unhealthy, habit of documenting their darkest hours on videotape.

That Capturing the Friedmans takes all of 10 minutes to get to the molestation charges, barely introducing us to the family before the freak show begins, tells you all you need to know. Jarecki doesn't treat the Friedmans as humans -- more like germs on a microscope slide. Errol Morris-y footage, presumably left over from the film's incarnation, shows David in his clown outfit performing against a white backdrop, and occasionally jaunty, off-key music plays under certain scenes as well, as if we might otherwise miss the cheap irony of David's profession vis-à-vis his family situation. Perhaps because the crime of which Jesse and Arnold are accused and eventually convicted is so appalling, already disengaged viewers (and critics) have glossed over such crude manipulations, but they're better suited to the likes of Inside Edition than a long-form documentary that at least pretends to give its subjects a fair shake. David's hatred for his mother, Elaine, is palpable, but even in the footage he shot, there must have been something to make her look like less of a fanged harridan than she does here.

Interviewing an expert on false confession and presenting conflicting accounts from police officers about what they were looking for when they raided the Friedmans' house, Jarecki tentatively airs the idea that the charges against them may have been at least exacerbated by hysteria, if not created out of whole cloth. But instead of presenting both sides, Capturing the Friedmans merely seems to be hedging its bets. Compare it to the portrait of small-town hysteria in Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's infinitely superior Paradise Lost and Friedmans' failings are manifest, and many. What comes across most forcefully is Jarecki's own unease with his subject, which colors everything like a foul smear. It's like watching through mud.

Capturing the Friedmans

Directed by Andrew Jarecki A Magnolia Pictures release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse