Alix Palmer on Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans It could hardly be described as a cheerful night out. Andrew Jarecki's documentary on the collapse of a respectable Long Island family under allegations of multiple sexual abuse by father Arnold Friedman and son Jesse is often gruelling viewing. But it does lift the lid on America's neuroses and obsessions. It also offers a chilling indictment of the nuclear family. The premise is simple. A 'normal, happy' family is torn apart when father Arnold is shown to have ordered pornographic material, featuring young boys, from the Netherlands. Searches of the family home reveal pornographic computer images and stashes of magazines. When the police decide to start interviewing Arnold's young computer students a pattern of systematic abuse and sodomy appears to have been revealed - but the truth is uncertain. Whether or not the Friedmans are guilty of the multple sodomy of which they re accused, is a difficult question and one that Jarecki, probably wisely, chooses not to try There are multiple twists and turns - just as the viewer thinks they've reached a stable view the tables are turned yet again with another piece of contradictory evidence. Truth is a difficult question in this film. It isn't a relativist vision where truth doesn't exist but truth is seen as multi-complex. There is criticism of the police for potentially 'leading' witnesses and of the wealthy New Jersey community for being whipped up by the hysteria of the whole situation. The sense is almost of a competition in abuse terms and of not wanting to be 'left out'. One father, convinced that his son was not abused, talks of being told by others in the community that he must be 'in denial". There is also the suggestion that at least some of the children's evidence is highly disputable, induced through hypnosis and 'recovered memory techniques Most shocking from many points of view, though, is the indictment of this wealthy and respectable American family. We see misogyny and the traps that the assumption of hetthe insight into the dynamics of the hypocrisies. knee. erosexuality and heterosexual marriage lay for those that don't fit in. Most interesting is Friedman family, with its hidden secrets and What's sometimes less than helpful is the lack of narrative voice determined by the documentary format combined with the order in which Jarecki chooses to reveal information. It's only near the end of the film, for example, that we hear Arnold's lawyer talking about his sexual arousal at the sight of a young boy in prison bouncing on a It's only late on that we hear that Arnold has mother. 'confessed' (we can't be certain this is true) to molesting a boy or boys whilst on holiday at the family's holiday home. It's also late on that we learn that he has confessed to sex with his brother when Arnold was 13 and his brother 8- a fact confused by his brother's lack of memory of the event or events. There is the sense that, as a self-confessed paedophile, Arnold was never likely to get a fair hearing in court. However, the guilty plea he made in the light of a dearth of physical evidence can still be seen as puzzling.
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