|
CAPTURING
THE FRIEDMANS
9/10
USA
2003 : Andrew JARECKI : 107 mins
Capturing
the Friedmans isn’t just the best documentary we’re likely to see
released in the UK this year – it’s emphatically one of 2004’s most powerful,
shattering and thought-provoking films of any category. And it
came about more or less by accident. Director Jarecki made his fortune
by developing Moviefone, the system by which most urban Americans now
book their cinema-tickets. AOL bought it from him five years ago for an
astronomical sum, and Jarecki – with plenty of cash, money and time on
his hands – decided to return to his first love, moviemarking. His first
feature was to be a documentary on the professional clowns operating on
Manhattan’s lucrative birthday-party circuit.
The acknowledged
king of the party-clown circuit was (and to a lesser extent still is)
“Silly Billy” – aka David Friedman. But when interviewing Friedman, Jarecki
detected an anger and an unhappiness that went far beyond even the stereotype
of the ‘crying-on-the-inside’ tragic clown. Delicately probing further,
Jarecki discovered that, in the late 1980s, his father Arnold and then-teenage
brother Jesse were convicted of shocking sex-abuse offences against children
who attended award-winning teacher Arnold’s evening computer classes.
But this was
only the start of Jarecki’s discoveries. At almost every stage of the
case, the Friedman children recorded their daily lives on audiotape, 8mm
and video – building up an unprecedented archive documenting the disintegration
of a supposedly ordinary middle-class Long Island Jewish family. The resulting
film – combining copious extracts from the Friedmans’ own footage, talking-head
interviews with the survivors, contemporary news reports and commentary
by expert witnesses – adds up to a devastating critique of the American
justice system. But there are no easy answers here: all truth is subjective,
and the ground shifts beneath the viewers’ feet with dizzying, dazzling
speed.
Jarecki’s
film takes no editorial ‘line,’ and indeed takes care to question the
very nature of its own non-fiction format. But regardless of how each
individual viewer responds to Arnold and Jesse’s cases, the issues raised
by Capturing the Friedmans remain current on both sides of the
Atlantic – indeed, in every culture blighted by the twin evils of paedophilia
and paedophilia-hysteria.
29th March,
2004
(seen 22nd January : Cineworld, Milton Keynes – CinemaDays
event)
first
seen at Edinburgh Film Festival, 16th August 2003 – original
rating 8/10
by Neil
Young
Buy Capturing the Friemans on DVD
-
|
