"Can't you put your anger aside for one minute?"
Capturing the Friedmans is a deeply unsettling film on several levels. I have been putting off writing about it simply because I didn’t want to have to think about it anymore. I just wanted to move on, to act like it never happened, much like how the family in the film just wanted to have it be done with and get on with their lives, how they used to be, but they realize that’s no longer possible.
The style of the documentary is very personal. It is technically well done, with the integration of copious amounts of home movies and audiotapes into the talking head interviews and various other techniques. The structure of it is designed in a specific way to make you question the nature of the investigation, and of the actual crimes.
We know that Arnold Friedman was a pedophile, he confessed flat out. What we are left with then is a numbers game. How many children did he molest? How many kiddie porn magazines were there, really? How many years in prison does he deserve? Many of these questions don’t have answers. There is no true and just penalty for molestation. Surely it is a mental affliction that should in some sense be treated as an illness, but it is also a crime. Will an extra 10 or 20 years, even a lifetime in jail ever make up for the damage that has been wrought upon unsuspecting children’s lives and their families?
It’s all very complicated, and we never know who’s acting and who’s baring their soul, who’s doing what they think is right by lying or what they know is right by telling the truth. The police make all of this so much worse by not being an even hand to guide the madness. By falsifying evidence and stretching the truth they are only worsening, by an incalculable amount, the entire equation.
What we have is a hall of mirrors and big gaping holes occupied by deeply scarred people who, it seems, never really understood themselves in the first place. There is a certain fanaticism, a degree of manic documentation that went on within the family, even amidst the greatest of crises. We could chalk this up to family dynamics and accept its strangeness, but it all takes on these epic and infinitely grotesque suggestions. And what family in their right minds would not only agree to a full-fledged documentary of their relatives various ailments and crimes, but would also divulge seemingly endless amounts of extremely personal information and documents? This seems more like an invitation to disaster than a way to finally set the record straight and clear your name.
The film is literally bursting at the seams with account after account of discrepancies and conflicting evidence to sway you hither and thither. We emerge not so much with any answers or a concrete ground to stand on and accuse, but rather an extraordinarily fragile understanding that we must accept that we’ll never know the whole truth. Truth is simply a concept we can struggle to achieve that will only lead us down more alleys of unanswered questions we’d like to pretend never existed in the first place.
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