Delayed Reaction: Capturing the Friedmans

The Pitch: A story about a clown turns into a story about child molester but not in the way you think.

A documentary about a father and son arrested for child molestation despite a lack of concrete evidence.

Andrew Jarecki has an odd career. He's most famous as the filmmaker behind HBO's The Jinx. That series was the result of years of extensive investigation on Robert Durst. He even made a movie about Durst called All Good Things five years before the HBO series. He's also tied to the documentary and series Catfish as a producer. He first made his name well before any of that with an equally buzz-worthy documentary that started pretty tamely. He was collecting footage for a documentary about clowns. When profiling one of the clowns in New York, he found out that his brother and father had been arrested for child molestation over a decade earlier. The family happened to have an extensive video archive from that time. Jarecki took that footage and some current interviews to make Capturing the Friedmans, which was praised and derided for not taking a firming stance on the guilt of the subjects.

It's clear that Jarecki is interested in half truths. He's built his career on people telling stories that can't be proven and actions that are difficult to interpret.

Documentaries often come down to the right person chancing upon the right story. So much of it has to do with opportunity. For example, Icarus wasn't as good as it could've been, because the size of the story exceeded the ability of the filmmaker. Often, the greats like Errol Morris are stuck making more mundane topics sound more interesting than they really are.

Capturing the Friedmans is a bit of a perfect storm. Jarecki happens upon a story that he's well-suited for, with a family who is mostly willing to open up about it, and has the kind of extensive film archive that documentarians dream of. The end result is a movie about people with despicable impulses who I came away feeling genuinely torn about.

There's more than a little deceptive storytelling going on in the movie. I suspected as I was watching this that I wasn't getting the full story. It didn't take much digging afterwards to discover that there was some additional evidence that was left out of the movie that make the father and son look a lot more guilty. 

I'm less bothered by that in this than in something like Making a Murderer though for a couple reasons. For one, MaM had a lot more hours to play with in which it could've given some dissenting points. More importantly, the counter evidence left out of MaM makes that subject look really guilty when the show is really pushing for him to look innocent. The point of Capturing the Friedmans isn't innocence or guilt. It's about what we do in the grey area. The accusations are pretty horrific. The stories never quite add up though. The father talks about past trauma growing up that his sibling doesn't remember. The sons and numerous boys who would've been present during the computer classes when this molestation would've occurred are clueless about much of this. The father is initially discovered because of his collection of child pornography. Does that immediately make him guilty of other accusations? Impulses aren't the same as actions. I'm don't want to be taking the side of a pedophile though. The thought exercise this movie puts you through is disturbingly effective.

And there't the unnerving response the family has to it all. I get the idea of laughing through the pain, but geez. If I was about to go to jail for these crimes, especially if I wasn't guilty, I'd be inconsolable. Good things don't happen to people who go to jail for that: guilty or innocent.

Sorry. I'm processing this all in real time.
It's hard to recommend Capturing the Friedmans. Like The Act of Killing, it's an very effective documentary that, ideally, no one would ever have to see. It's thought provoking and challenging. It's left me cold and unsatisfied. It is exactly what it intends to be though and attacks challenging topics. 

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend