While with any number of competent, feature-length documentaries one can happily say "wait until it turns up on the small screen", with Capturing the Friedmans it is well worth sitting in the dark to find out the extent to which you think you are being deliberately kept there.
A vividly personal, devastating story of a family that was hopelessly compromised years before it was scapegoated for crimes that two of its members may or may not have committed.
The more this family films itself, it seems, the less it can actually perceive clearly: camera as funhouse mirror, rather than sooth-seeker, in other words.
It's disconcerting to be appalled and even slightly nauseated by a masterpiece. But Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans is a documentary, and so it's disconcerting largely because of its subject matter—it shocks us with the truth.
So many of us have joked -- and in our darkest moments, wondered -- exactly what family films would reveal about us and those bound to us by blood. The director Andrew Jarecki has made exactly that self-absorption the heart of his engagingly evenhanded and intelligently assembled first feature.
There’s no doubt that the film delivers the emotional equivalent of a kidney punch, but that’s as much a result of the filmmaker’s attitude—better suited to entomological research—and the tidy Rashomon structure he imposes on material as it is to the Friedmans themselves.
A startling documentary that takes the widely publicized child molestation case of the 1980s and works it into a stirring examination of truth at odds with perception, the high price of privacy in the media era and the blinding veil of blood ties.