Capturing the Friedmans is a documentary about a middle-class Great Neck, Long Island, family two of whose members, a father and the youngest of his three sons, were arrested on charges of child molestation in the late 1980s, at the tail end of a period of national hysteria consisting of like prosecutions on no sounder basis than the coaxed or coached allegations of minors. Arnold Friedman, the father, was a high school science teacher who conducted computer classes in his home, with which son Jesse, 19, assisted. Both Friedmans pleaded not guilty at arraignment, but both eventually changed their pleas for reasons that indict the American legal system rather than illuminate their guilt or innocence. Arnold, whose wife, Elaine, divorced him, died in prison, a suicide; Jesse served thirteen years. By the time Jesse reunited with his two brothers, David and Seth, the family had scattered. The boys’ mother had remarried.
The police first intervene to arrest Arnold for possessing child pornography. They proceed to interview each of his computer class students. Less than half accuse the two Friedmans, and those who do not include forthright supporters who insist that the Friedmans never did anything sexual in class with any of the students. Of those that do accuse, some eventually admit to having lied under parental scrutiny and police pressure. The most adamant complainant’s memories were induced—“planted” in his brain—by hypnosis. One of the police investigators all but says that he wouldn’t permit those whom he interviewed to deny that they were molested. There was no physical evidence in the case. If the accounts of the accusers are to be believed, there would have been a substantial amount of bleeding and evidence of semen. No parent, however, noticed anything, nor did a single student ever complain to his parent(s) about any sexual activity in the computer classes until the police came knocking. (I say “his,” but in fact the film never establishes whether the class was all-male. In the absence of certain knowledge, I’m assuming this was the case.) Students came back, class after class. There can be little serious doubt about the innocence of both Friedmans.
Life in its complexity, though, threw a cloud into this absolute clarity. Arnold Friedman, it turns out, is a self-confessed pedophile. As a boy, he thus engaged his younger brother, Howard, for years, in sexual activity. He did the same with the young son of family friends and was terrified afterwards he would be found out. Arnold, then, had a history of molesting boys. Or did he? Howard recalls no such occurrences; “They’re not in my head,” he says, although the fact that, as an adult, he is gay certainly doesn’t preclude the possibility that, had they occurred, the events might have awakened in Howard a homosexual disposition that’s unconsciously identified with familial, that is, fraternal, love. But Arnold insists that he molested no boys in Great Neck, that that part of his life was in his very long-ago past. I believe him. We see his enormous guilt, which his arrest and imminent prosecution have reawakened; and, if we are sophisticated in our understanding of the mechanism of guilt, we realize that it’s very possible that Arnold never engaged in child-molesting activity in his entire life. Impulses, inclinations: These would have been sufficient to generate such guilt, especially regarding his own brother—guilt which, when suppressed, blurred the boundary between thought and deed. That is the nature of the beast.
Arnold’s marriage falls apart. Elaine apparently knew nothing about either the pornography or Arnold’s claims of having molested boys prior to their marriage. She suddenly feels that her husband is a stranger and a liar, that their marriage, because of her husband’s “secrets,” has been a sham. To her eldest son David’s disgust, she won’t say that her husband is innocent of the current charges because she can’t be certain one way or the other. She doesn’t know what’s what anymore because everything she thought she knew has been tossed into turmoil. Unlike David, we feel for her challenging situation. Elaine is not an evil person; she is an undone person whose residual loyalty to Arnold manifests in ways other than her proclaiming his innocence.
However, this is a film about evil women—two of them. They are among the most vicious monsters I have seen in any sort of film. And, of course, they are quadruply terrifying because they are actual monsters who horribly abused the power they once wielded. One is the retired head of the local police Sex Crimes Unit, former Detective Frances Gelasso, who was undeterred by evidence in her determination to crucify Arnold and Jesse Friedman. She is oblivious to what she has done, blind to it; she thinks she was the good guy who truly cared for the victimized children while Jesse, in particular, remained unapologetic. The camera catches her lies, her callousness, her bone-deep brutality beneath a practiced, self-serving veneer of reasonableness. While we sympathize to a certain extent, that is to say, the extent to which her heartlessness was, perhaps, a byproduct of her dealings with so many actual child molesters, we must find this person repugnant and dangerous, and we also must wonder how many other of the investigations she conducted or supervised likewise disregarded factual evidence. We may think she comes from another planet when she (apparently sincerely) believes that Elaine had to have been lying when this largely sheltered woman professed not to know what “sodomy” is. Gelasso, here and elsewhere, is frighteningly myopic about human nature and the human condition. The other monster may in fact still be wielding power. This is the judge in the Friedman case, Judge Abbey Boklan. By a distressing and perhaps telling coincidence, Boklan is a former head of the Sex Crimes Unit. She flat-out tells us that she knew that the Friedmans were guilty the moment she saw them—this, despite the fact that she never heard any defense evidence since the Friedmans’ guilty pleas preempted a trial. One must conclude that, had there been a trial, Boklan also would have disregarded the evidence and, of course, used her authority to direct a jury, however subtly and cunningly, to do the same.
The guilty pleas after so long a season of protested innocence by both Arnold and Jesse: How did these come about? Elaine pressured Arnold to plead guilty, convincing him that it would benefit Jesse’s chances of acquittal if Jesse were tried alone. Arnold pled guilty, however misguidedly, for his son’s sake and to appease Elaine. Boklan let it be known that, if Jesse were convicted at trial, she would hand down consecutive rather than concurrent sentences, with the net result that Jesse (who, recall, was 19 at the time) would remain in prison for the rest of his life. Moreover, a smart boy, Jesse gauged the prevailing winds; juries all over the country had been convicting likely innocent people of similar charges. He knew Great Neck. He copped a plea that would keep him in prison no more than 18 years. We draw from this a portrait of a legal system at the whim of a careless, manipulative police force, biased, sadistic judges, and juries tapped into hysterical and near-hysterical emotions that preclude their viewing criminal defendants as innocent until proven guilty. As Gelasso (in a self-serving context) admits, merely the charge of child molestation is enough to ruin a person’s life. To a certain extent, the system defeats the innocent, who, as in the case of Arnold and Jesse, just “give up.”
All this material sounds interesting, but, oddly enough, Capturing the Friedmans is not a good film. The director, Andrew Jarecki, hedges his bets by conjuring a smokescreen of ambiguity where, to the rational at least, little ambiguity exists. Much of his filmmaking is dull, punctuated by brilliant spurts of David’s “home movies” recording his family’s long ordeal following the Thanksgiving Day police raid that uncovered his father’s stash of pornography. Jarecki relied on this raw material, distracting audiences from the fact that his own filmmaking was no match for it. Jarecki is the millionaire CEO of Moviefone, and Capturing the Friedmans is little more than a vanity project. Jarecki started out making a lighthearted documentary about children’s birthday party clowns. David Friedman is “Silly Billy,” the most popular such clown in New York City. When Jarecki found out about Friedman’s family history, his opportunism got the better of him and he plunged out of his own inch-deep depth into much more precarious waters. I have seen better TV documentaries on such cases as the Friedmans’, although their case, it should be pointed out, involved no allegations of satanic rituals.
Jarecki’s coy, fraudulent air of “Well, you decide” trivializes serious allegations. It’s the fractured nature of Jarecki’s film that most soundly defeats it. On the one hand, the film makes a convincing case for the innocence of the Friedmans, and, on the other, it generates the attitude, which pervades everything, that it’s doing no such thing, that the situation is too complicated for the filmmaker to be sure, and that only the substitute jury of an audience can make the proper determination. This artistic irresponsibility yields a dense, at times compelling piece that nevertheless lacks unity. It isn’t a film; it’s a Rorschach test. Needless to say, my “take” on the issue of the Friedmans’ guilt will not be everyone else’s.
I am disturbed by one thing more. A hate call that the Friedman family receives is anti-Semitic. Since Jarecki elected to include this in the film, why is there no examination of the extent to which anti-Semitism contributed to the police persecution of the Friedmans?
Jarecki’s film drew prizes as best documentary from critics’ groups in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Kansas City and Seattle.
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DESIGN FOR LIVING (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)
June 1, 2010I have never read Noel Coward’s play Design for Living or seen it performed, but I understand that Ben Hecht’s script for the film, which Ernst Lubitsch, no less, directed, retains just one of Coward’s lines, presumably at least in part because, shortly before Hollywood imposed its production code, Coward’s risqué dialogue was considered too sophisticated for American rubes. That said, a smattering of lines cracked me up—such as when, asked by painter George Curtis, why she didn’t like a specific painting of his, Gilda Farrell snaps with delicious sarcasm: “It creaks of originality. Lady Godiva on a bicycle.” Gilda, played with free, naughty modernity by Miriam Hopkins, gets another good line to speak. Referring to their ro-romantic relationship, she says to George and his playwright-compatriot Tom Chambers: “Let’s talk about it from every angle, without excitement. Like a disarmament conference.” All this comes from the first and best part of Lubitsch’s film, which swerves into unappetizing marital melodrama before rediscovering its bohemian soul and comical élan.
Both George and Tom (Gary Cooper and Fredric March, with March giving the film’s best performance) love Gilda, although Gilda obstructs their favorite relationship, which is with each other—a platonic conversion of Coward’s sexual inclination, perhaps. But what I like most about this film, which otherwise I don’t much like at all, is the shabby, impoverished Paris apartment that George and Tom share—one which the filthiness of these two bachelors further assaults. A high point arrives when Gilda, visiting, plops herself on a couch from which a cloud of thick dust, disturbed, rises. Gilda takes no notice; she knows the boys’ hard times from her own experience.
Let’s just say that Gilda’s dainty derrière delivers a blow with something more than “the Lubitsch touch.”
Tags:Fredric March, Lubitsch/Grunes
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