Capturing the Friedmans (2003, Andrew Jarecki) (Patreon)

74/100

Third viewing, last seen during its original theatrical release. I didn't review it at the time, most likely because it opened right after I returned from Cannes (fest reports got filed post-fest back then, what bliss), so the only contemporaneous record is a chat-group post, reproduced below. Initially I'm responding to a friend's complaint about a review: "[H]is take on the miscarriage of justice aspect of the film didn't strike me as especially exciting." 

You know, I had the same reaction upon reading Taylor's review. I remember wondering why he was spending so much time and energy on what seemed to me by far the least fascinating aspect of the Friedman saga. (In fact, I very briefly started to tune out a bit when it first became evident that this was a false-memory/hysteria case; that's a subject I've read about extensively and I assumed, wrongly, that the film would tell me nothing I didn't already know.) A second viewing, however, makes it clear that Taylor was simply following Jarecki's lead. I'd estimate that 60% of Friedmans' running time is devoted to the question of Arnold and Jesse's guilt or innocence, to the film's overall detriment (though I still think it's excellent). [Why am I suddenly writing like Le Chuck?] {Brackets in original; that was the friend to whom I was replying.}

I also felt more strongly this time that Jarecki never quite succeeds in making the film's various themes dovetail—the self-preservation aspect (in both senses of the word, natch), for example, is repeatedly introduced and then just as quickly abandoned (for further interviews with former computer students and law enforcement officials, arrgh). Given the title and opening credits sequence, I kept waiting for the family's obsession with recording itself, even at moments of crisis, to emerge as a controlling metaphor, but in the end it seemed just another compelling thread in the tapestry. Not that that's too shabby or anything, mind. But the cohesion that kicks a film like this onto another level just isn't there.

[My friend again:]

As much as an amazed inquiry into the unfathomable complexities of the human heart, the movie is quite simply one of the most heartbreaking love stories I've ever seen.

I wonder whether I can cajole you into expanding upon this idea? Because I made a conscious effort to watch the movie through this lens the second time, and it seemed awfully blurry to me. Are you moved by David's unswerving loyalty to his late father, to the point where he remains stubbornly in denial about Arnold's pedophilia?  ("What does that sentence even mean?") Because otherwise I can only imagine that you're referring to the way that the charges tear a once-happy family apart, and my problem with that reading is that the forces involved are almost entirely external. What acrimony we see in David's home videos is almost entirely directed by the children at Elaine, and it's pretty clear that Elaine was always an outsider in the Friedman household. So what happens is plenty sad, but not, to my way of thinking, tragic.

Also, anybody else think the Epilogue was ill-conceived?

Turns out I haven't changed much in the past 18 years, as the camera's presence at Elaine and Jesse's reunion still makes me queasy, even though they'd surely agreed to it. (David meeting Jesse outside the prison doesn’t bother me as much, though I question its necessity. At least it's shot from a fair distance, making it feel less intrusive.) Society has changed, however, in a way that makes the film play somewhat differently now, albeit not to its detriment. Whether Arnold and/or Jesse really abused their computer-class students remains of comparatively minimal interest, but Jarecki's not-at-all-subtle contention that they were railroaded ("This student's [hypnotically recovered] testimony led to 35 counts of sodomy") used to seem as incontestable as the case for the West Memphis Three's innocence. Complicated, to be sure, by the fact that Arnold Friedman genuinely was a pedophile and probably belonged in prison, even if not for those particular crimes. But back in 2003, someone onscreen could just mention "McMartin" and trust that we'd understand what that signifies. The case was less distant then than Capturing the Friedmans is now. Today, on the other hand, we're (correctly) predisposed to believe accusers and be highly skeptical of any notion that they've been coerced or pressured or brainwashed into giving false testimony. That doesn't preclude believing these charges to be false—they really do seem insane—but I involuntarily expended mental energy trying to refute the film's thesis, and couldn't help constantly wondering what details might have been omitted. (Quite a few, some claimed even at the time; Jarecki never so much as mentions a third defendant who confessed.) 

Again, though, none of that really makes a significant difference to me. I was always in the "riveting train wreck" camp, fascinated by a dysfunctional-family dynamic that arguably would be the same no matter who had or hadn't done what. People obsessively recording their personal dramas has become unremarkable—that's another major shift since 2003 (to say nothing of the late '80s), we all carry video cameras everywhere we go—but it's nonetheless rare, even today, to see candid footage this uncomfortably raw emerge from behind the scenes of a newsworthy criminal case. While Jarecki never quite manages to structure Capturing the Friedmans around the mens' self-archival impulse, I give him enormous credit for shaping a narrative that draws you in ever deeper without the need for a gimmicky hook, even though he had one readily available. (Virtually any first-time filmmaker nowadays would open with the party-clown movie that Jarecki was working on when he met David Friedman, deploying the reveal of David's past as a plot twist. "Look, I was making a goofy doc short and stumbled onto a gold mine!" Leaving that for the Q&As takes real self-restraint.) I still don't find this film even remotely as heady and almost compulsively revealing as Paradise Lost, which casts a wider net in a scummier pond, but it's nonetheless an uncommonly intimate true-crime saga that's lost none of its power, even as rapidly shifting mores have recontextualized its point of view.