HAPPY FAMILY? The Friedmans before it all started. SUSPENDING JUDGMENT: Andrew Jarecki says he'd still hire Dave Friedman. TEARS OF A CLOWN As anyone familiar with the John Wayne Gacy story could have told him, Andrew Jarecki shouldn’t have been too surprised when his documentary about clowns took a strange and sinister turn. He wanted to do a profile on the guy he’d hired to entertain at his son’s birthday. That became Capturing the Friedmans, a harrowing, ambiguous, and provocative account of a notorious 1980s pedophile case. " It was originally a movie about professional children’s-birthday-party entertainers in New York City, " says Jarecki, " and Dave Friedman is, like, the number one guy. " Dave is also the son of Arnold Friedman, a respected Great Neck (Long Island) teacher, and the brother of Jesse Friedman, who was just 18 when on Thanksgiving Day 1987 he and his father found themselves under arrest for molesting young boys. After Arnold and Jesse were taken into custody by the police, the Friedmans proceeded to capture themselves on videotape, recording every brutal argument and pathetic reconciliation as they tried to cope with the ongoing investigation and prosecution, with the shocking revelations and the unresolved mysteries. All of which Jarecki includes in his film, as well as interviews with Friedman family members and the police, lawyers, journalists, and others involved in the case. More than the shocking nature of the material — not just the crime but its prosecution, too — the film has upset audiences by its refusal to judge. " This is a year in America when things tend to be painted very much in black and white, and it’s understandable, " Jarecki says. " I understand why terrorism and things tend to polarize people, but at the same time, I feel like most of the time that’s not true. You don’t generally have good people and bad people. You ask some guy who robbed a bank whether he’s good or bad and he says, ‘Well I’m just trying to feed my family,’ and it’s not quite as clear even though he did a very bad thing. " I think that in this film we try to transcend these easy definitions of people; we say, ‘Look, Arnold Friedman, in a lot of ways, is a very good guy.’ Certainly I’ve gotten tons of letters from people who knew I was making the film saying, ‘This man changed my life and I was a lousy student and he taught me how to use computers and he taught me about chemistry and I never saw a hint of any bad behavior of any kind from him and it was shocking to me that this case ever emerged.’ And then other people who say, ‘Well, I didn’t know Arnold Friedman, but I can’t believe that you would make a film about that case.’ I just feel like the fact that the film portrays things in a humane way and in an as realistic as possible way is something that’s being welcomed in general. People who see the film say, ‘You know, I was kind of ready for something that’s not quite so cut and dry.’  " Were Arnold and Jesse innocent? They pled guilty, but under circumstances, as the film demonstrates, that left them little choice and had little to do with justice. " The film sort of functions as the trial that never happened, " Jarecki answers. " I tried to express the information that I collected, and I certainly didn’t leave anything out, and so I think people come away with their own views. And whatever you believe about the guilt or innocence of the Friedmans, when the judge — a sitting judge in Nassau County Supreme Court — says in the film, ‘There was never a doubt in my mind as to their guilt,’ it tells you something. Because a judge has no business saying that when she hasn’t seen the trial, she hasn’t seen witnesses on both sides of the case. " But getting back to the clowns. How does David Friedman, whose tragic and often sordid background is exposed here for all to see, expect to maintain his clown business? " The movie opened in New York on May 30, and I think he’s concerned about it, " Jarecki admits. " But by the same token, I think it was a generous thing he did to be in the film because he knew that his brother wanted the film made so his family could tell a fuller version of their story. But I think it’s gotta cross his mind. " Knowing what he knows now, would he have had Friedman entertain at his kid’s birthday party? " I have hired him, and I would hire him again. He’s criticized for being a little sarcastic, but I don’t think you can criticize him for anything else. " — PK

If a pedophilic version of The Brothers Karamazov were hosted by Jerry Springer, or if Errol Morris were to shoot a contemporary The Crucible featuring accusations of child molestation rather than witchcraft, the result might be as unsettling as Capturing the Friedmans. First-time documentary filmmaker Andrew Jarecki (among his previous film credits is co-founding Moviefone) has taken on a lot in his debut, and his ingenuousness and audacity count among the film’s virtues. Without seeming prejudice or much constraint, he plunges himself and his audience into the unwholesome, pitiful, and frightening lives of the Friedmans, a model upper-middle-class family living in the comfortable suburban community of Great Neck, Long Island.

It isn’t news that hanky-panky goes on behind respectable white picket fences, but the Friedman case is a shocker. Jarecki discloses teasing bits and pieces of the story with snippets of interviews and home movies. Eldest son David Friedman says that his father, Arnold, wasn’t perfect but that what he liked about him is that he once dumped a promising science career to pursue his dream of playing music in the Catskills. Arnold’s wife, Elaine, says that Arnold liked pictures. David says that Arnold didn’t like to spend time with his wife. As the comments accumulate (youngest son Jesse is also interviewed, but middle son Seth refused to participate in the film), a portrait emerges of boys bonded by a common sense of humor and enthusiasm against a wet-blanket mom. A kind of My Three Sons, except that mother’s home too.

So it probably seemed to the Friedmans’ neighbors until Thanksgiving 1987, when mail inspectors raided the house. It was a sting operation in which Arnold was set up to receive delivery of some hardcore kiddie porn. The search turned up more pedophilic magazines, but when they also found a list of local boys with whom Friedman had been conducting computer courses in his basement, they decided they were onto something much bigger than dirty pictures.

At this point, the film breaks into two stories, both fascinating but not necessarily complementary. There’s the increasingly hysterical prosecution of Arnold and 18-year-old Jesse, who are accused of an astounding number of criminal acts after the police start interrogating Arnold’s students and come up with increasingly horrific and incredible allegations. Jarecki interviews the police investigators, the prosecutors, and the judge, all of whom blithely assert their confidence in a case devoid of physical evidence and based largely on testimony elicited through hypnosis. He also talks with investigative reporter Debbie Nathan, who explains how the Friedmans were one of many in the wave of dubious ’80s cases of sexual molestation based on the now discredited evidence of repressed memory. In the end, though, Jarecki’s approach to this issue is too timid. Given the magnitude of the apparent injustice and the grotesque abuses of power plainly evident, it seems clear he should have been more focused on uncovering the truth along the lines of Morris’s The Thin Blue Line or Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost.

But if the police’s capturing of the Friedmans arouses doubt and indignation, the Friedmans’ capturing of themselves taps into passions less righteous. Early in the film, Jarecki shows a snippet from a videotape David had made in the midst of the case. Directly addressing the camera, David declares that this tape is being made for himself alone and then is cut off just as he erupts into a tearful confession of some sort. It’s a bit of a come-on, and there’s lots more from David’s video library to follow. He recorded the ongoing family breakdown, with his brothers (Elaine and Arnold shun the camera) seemingly enjoying the opportunity to act out on the video stage the self-lacerations of their big fat Greek tragedy. Although these videos are hardly flattering or illuminating, he offered them to Jarecki, who made generous use of them. In the interest of what? Voyeurism, narcissism, and masochism have their appeal, but it’s criminal to let them upstage truth and justice.