As this tangled tale unfolds in Andrew Jarecki’s suspenseful “Capturing the Friedmans,” voted best documentary at this year’s Sundance, you may initially leap to the same conclusion. But the deeper Jarecki delves, the more complicated and ambiguous the story becomes. Everyone’s testimony is cast in doubt and we, the audience, find ourselves in a “Rashomon” -like maze of uncertainty. Jarecki interviews all the key players: Arnold’s wife, Elaine, who withdraws from her husband and is demonized by her children; the angry, agonized oldest son, David, who works as a party clown in New York; the police, investigators and lawyers; the alleged victims and their parents, and journalist Debbie Nathan, who investigated the investigation. (Only the middle son, Seth, refused to participate.) But he gives us more than talking heads: while making his film, Jarecki discovered that the self-obsessed Friedmans had trained a camera on themselves during the entire ordeal. Just why the Friedmans would allow these painfully intimate scenes to be circulated is a question that haunts the film. But with the help of their own home movies, Jarecki shows a family disintegrating before our eyes.
The artful way “Capturing the Friedmans” reveals its lurid twists and turns is in itself disquieting. There’s a hint of coyness in Jarecki’s method that borders on exploitation. And not everyone will be comfortable with all the questions he leaves unanswered. But it’s precisely this ambiguity, this refusal of black-and-white solutions, that makes Jarecki’s film so haunting. It’s like a nightmare that follows you around in daylight: you can’t quite decode it, you can’t shake it, you can’t stop turning it over and over in your mind. This is one queasily powerful movie.
