Ray Pride

Andrew Jarecki met an angry clown and decided it would make a nice short documentary.

The clown, David Friedman, is New York's most successful party clown for children. Jarecki, 40, studied film at Princeton (as had his brother Eugene, whose "The Trials of Henry Kissinger" was released in 2002), and had co-written and performed the theme song to the WB series "Felicity." Until "Capturing the Friedmans," his highest public profile came from co-founding MovieFone, the 1998 sale of which to AOL netted him a nine-figure return (and the ability to relocate to Rome with his family).

"Why is this man so angry?" Jarecki said he asked himself. It took three years to find out why, and the result, "Capturing the Friedmans" is a crisp rendition of a convoluted horror story, of guilt, public scorn and the nature of truth itself. In the late 1980s, Arnold Friedman was an award-winning schoolteacher in Great Neck, Long Island. With his wife, Elaine, he raised three boys. He was an "early-adopter," teaching computer science to students after hours in the family home. In 1987, their quiet Thanksgiving dinner is interrupted by a police raid, and Arnold and his 18-year-old son Jesse are arrested and led away in handcuffs in front of a phalanx of TV news reporters. They're accused of a terrible crime, and the charges only grow, leading to an indictment for hundreds of offenses. The revelations shock throughout, to the very end of the film. But the revelations aren't all about the Friedmans--it's also about detectives, lawyers and the scorching contempt of a suburban community. (At the risk of seeming coy, I'll note that other reviews will spell out precisely what turns the narrative takes, but it seems best to discover the power of Jarecki and his editor Richard Hankin and other collaborators' intent craft for yourself.)

Jarecki eventually got Friedman to talking, which got other members of his family talking, which led to the documentary that won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance this year. Most great docs have some form of kismet motoring them ahead: Jarecki not only lucked into remarkable material, he knew how to handle the three-year journey that brought it to Sundance (and a relatively rapid theatrical release via Magnolia Pictures and HBO).

There are moments of intense emotions. "A few years ago," Jarecki says, "Before I really understood the depth of the Friedman story, I first interview Elaine, who is the mother of the family. At one point I had asked her a question, and she drifted off for a moment, sort of lost in a memory. Then she stopped herself, saying, `I don't know. I--I can't say too much about it. We were a family.' The idea of a woman in her seventies speaking about her own family in the past tense was strikingly sad. I didn't know how this family had ceased to be a family, but I was determined to understand it. It was that phrase, `We were a family,' that stayed with me and drove me to do the work, to learn the story, to spend time with the family and to get to know them."

Late in the process, Jarecki discovered that David had large library videotapes of the family. With this footage, it is almost as if we're seeing Kafka's version of "The Osbournes." The footage includes journal entries to himself where he rages tearfully about what the family had done to itself and what the community had visited upon them. Family dinners, including a Seder that took place after the indictments, in which the camera sits, another family member, unnoticed, as terrible recriminations are thrown around the table. Home movies aren't usually this bitter. Their home movies are different, Jarecki says, because of "the kind of material they chose to capture. While most families use home movies just to document special happy celebrations like birthdays, this family never turned the camera off. Even after the police showed up and their lives began to change forever. They filmed their most intimate moments, their most intense and private moments." There are several heartbreaking passages of home movies shot on film three generations earlier. "Starting with 8mm films, the family documented itself incessantly. Seeing their story unfold from inside the film provides a level of intimacy that hasn't really been present in films in the past."

It's an amazing piece of work, and the New Yorker's David Denby made a superb case for it being a masterpiece. I'm not sure I can go that far without a second viewing, but it is a haunting, masterful work that matters. "On a philosophical level," Jarecki says, "the film is about the elusive nature of truth; how our memories evolve over time to suit our needs; memories of our family; memories of our parents; members of things we've done or felt we had to do in our lives or our work. It's also about the nature of family and of society; what we owe each other as members of a family and of a community."

"Capturing the Friedmans" opens Friday at Landmark Century.

(2003-06-04)

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