Andrew Jarecki planned to a make a film about David Friedman, a cute though often surly New York party clown who performed as Silly Billy, but he found that Friedman’s story was no clown act. David came from the Friedmans of Great Neck, Long Island, who in the 1980s became a squalid scandal. Father Arnold, an admired computer teacher, and teen son, Jesse, were arrested and then plead guilty to pedophile charges, including sex games involving sodomy with boy students.
The scandal began when Arnold ran afoul of postal laws for ordering and receiving “kiddie porn.”
“Capturing the Friedmans” — “capturing” is pregnant with multiple meanings — is a fascinating and rather repulsive dossier of interviews, old family films and videos that David obsessively taped after the legal nightmare erupted.
It is full of startling twists and coy implications — including that Arnold’s dear brother Howard, who trembles with outrage that his sibling was prosecuted, might have been Arnold’s primal victim.
It is also suggested that many of the rape charges brought against Arnold were sparked by a form of group hysteria fanned by the media and alarmed parents (and tinged by anti-Semitism?). There was no physical evidence, though Arnold was caught with porn and made some damning confessions.
Jesse’s complicity remains a puddle of murk. He was the son closest to his dad in spirit, making inane jokes on the day of his sentencing, much as Arnold (a former bandleader) breezily knocked off “Cheek to Cheek” on the piano the night before he was taken to prison.
Arnold remains a cipher, a meek nebbish who was happiest being a sort of patriarchal emcee to his sons. The most damning witness against his character, though testifying only in the film, is his wife Elaine. A disgusted drudge, she admits the marriage was a mistake from the start and that she felt internally exiled by the male bonding around her — David and Jesse are scornful of her for being “cold,” for not leaping with Pavlovian loyalty to defend her husband.
Movie oversells
Jarecki’s feeling for complex ambiguity is fairly primitive. He jostles one “expert” against another, one family revelation or outcry against others, so that the one fact we’re clearly left with is that everyone is a loser, and you might develop a sneaking admiration for Seth, the son who opted not to be in the movie except in old photos.
Pitifully, David, the great recorder, becomes the great condemner, even as he protests his family’s innocence. Arnold has no tragic stature, and Jesse comes off as a stupified squirrel, a loyalist stooge.
Jarecki can’t resist overselling his overwhelming material, returning to photos and tapes of the happy, “normal” family as if its agonized dysfunction was just an elaborate trick of bad luck and ruthless legalism, almost a bad extension of Arnold’s minor career in show-biz.
There is hugely human pain here, but no Dostoevskian weight of suffering. If you wrote “The Brothers Friedman” it would be sad pulp.
And you don’t think of Abraham and Isaac in the Bible, you think of an old Woody Allen or Robert Klein family routine gone grotesquely wrong.
David Elliott is the movie critic of The San Diego Union-Tribune. © 2003 by the Copley News Service.