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Capturing the Friedmans, which has been rapturously reviewed, raises similar but more serious questions. Ostensibly it recounts the story of a mild-mannered high school teacher, Arnold Friedman, who with one of his sons was busted for child molestation, allegedly practiced on students in a computer class he ran in his basement in the '80s. The film implies, without quite saying so, that this was a bad rap. Arnold was no doubt a kiddie-porn addict. But he was, we're pretty sure, a looker, not a doer. No one produced any physical evidence that he or his son committed any sex crimes. We emerge from Andrew Jarecki's film convinced that Friedman was yet another victim of overzealous police work and mass hysteria.
But that's not really what the movie is about. The Friedmans obsessively recorded, on film and tape, their incredibly boring lives. And Jarecki converts this record of banality into a sly object lesson in bourgeois dysfunction, which turns viewers into--what? Jarecki says people are rebelling against big-budget Hollywood action and embracing an alternate, more authentically emotional, cinema. Maybe so. But our fondness for noble fowl aside, it's possible that we're simply becoming voyeurs of misery, quite heedless of how and to what end its images are manipulated and falsified. --Reported by Desa Philadelphia