Director: Andrew Jarecki
Documentary Rating: Must-see
I think if there were a Gallup poll on the most monstrous crime a person can commit, pedophilia would likely rank #1. It's loathsome and completely unforgivable. And yet, there's a more troubling aspect that Capturing the Friedmans adeptly raises - since the victims of pedophilia are so young and impressionable, how can you glean the truth from people whose memories are unreliable and who don't respond well to interrogation?
Where Capturing the Friedmans really excels is in its use of home video taken at the time of the Friedman controversy. For whatever reason, the eldest son was recording their daily life. This saves us the use of endless panning shots across family photos and repetition of video from the news media at the time. It also ensures that the people involved, being interviewed 15 years later, are unable to use their unreliable memories to gloss or distort what was actually going on.
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