by MATTHEW HAYS

It's one of those classic documentary stories, the kind that often make for the very best documentary films. New York filmmaker Andrew Jarecki was intent upon making what he thought would be a bittersweet profile of David Friedman, Manhattan's most successful birthday clown. "He blows up the most balloons, entertains at the most parties, worked for Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, and has been on Letterman," Jarecki recalls, matter-of-factly.

But there's nothing matter of fact about Jarecki's documentary, Capturing the Friedmans, a hit at Sundance and a film that's already secured a place on umpteen critic top-10 lists. What struck Jarecki while interviewing David were the gaps in his life story. "There were things he just didn't want to say," Jarecki says, relaxing in a Montreal hotel suite earlier this week. "There were things he didn't want to talk about, namely the scandal that ripped apart his family."

What Jarecki learned was that the late Friedman patriarch, Arnold, led a tightly knit trio of sons who laughed and kidded around with their dad. What happened later is both sad and confounding: Arnold, a respected and award-winning teacher, was caught in a police sting operation and was found with piles of kiddie porn; what followed were allegations that he'd sexually molested a huge number of his computing students, all of them minors. His son, Jesse, was also charged in the crimes. Inevitably, a media circus grew up around the arrest and subsequent trial.

Haunting home movies

What amazed Jarecki was that David told him he had 25 hours of footage that their father had taken of them while they were children; they had an additional 25 hours of video footage that, amazingly, the sons had taken as the family braced themselves and attempted to ride out the storm of charges and the trial. Jarecki struck a doc goldmine: he artfully interweaves key parts of the footage with his interviews with the key players in the story.

"It was a challenge to get David to see the idea shift from what would have been a great boon to his clown career into something else. My argument was that this may be a help to him and his family. To take this painful and complex part of your life. It was a shock to him that I'd discovered it. He said, ‘I know what you're saying, but at the same time, my conscious mind knows that it's not good to tell this story.' He suggested I visit his brother Jesse in jail. I did, and Jesse agreed that I should make the movie upon our first meeting - he was absolutely sure about it. I don't think it was necessarily any great trust he had in me, but things couldn't get any worse for him."

Capturing the Friedmans is one of those surreal docs, so full of strange events, coincidences and wackiness it feels like it couldn't possibly have happened. Indeed, some have suggested to Jarecki that the film must be make-believe. "After one screening, I saw some people leave the cinema, and one of them was quite shaken up by it. The other said to him, ‘Don't worry, it was just a mockumentary.' If I made it up, I really should get canonized for it, because it's beyond anything Christopher Guest has done. I couldn't possibly have made this up."

Questionable justice

What Jarecki does do is artfully raise questions about precisely what happened in the Friedman case. A fair trial, he suggests, did not occur: the judge never had any doubts that Friedman father and son were guilty; she signed releases allowing for the first cameras into the courtroom in her county, ensuring its outcome as a media zoo. Jarecki calls the convictions into question, especially in light of interviews with two alleged victims and one of their parents, who claim they were pushed into making allegations that were false or trumped up. "The story is such a page turner, you can't believe every time it changes," says Jarecki. "I had to follow it through to its conclusion or semi-conclusion."

Cinéma-vérité guru Frederick Wiseman has said he never wants to create the illusion of friendship with the people he's making a movie about; Sandi DuBowski (Trembling Before G-d) has suggested he couldn't help but become involved emotionally with the people he was filming. As for Jarecki and the Friedmans, the filmmaker says he couldn't help but become friendly with them. "I felt like being in these people's lives for three years, if I'd been constantly distancing myself, I couldn't have done it. We had conversations that involved my telling them about my own relationship with my father, as a way of letting them know that everyone's family has issues. Perhaps not pedophilia, but some kind of difficulty. I think it would have been more obtrusive, in a sense, if I'd continually been trying to separate myself."

As well as telling an intensely troubling story, Jarecki's feature feels like watching technology evolve before our eyes. The Super 8 clips of the family evoke those typical Super 8 emotions: melancholic glimpses of awkward family members, captured in shaky, decidedly unprofessional shots. The hues and colours of the faded footage are beautiful. When the film switches to the video footage captured by the sons, it matches the shift in tone and story: the whole thing starts to resonate with Rodney King and Court TV. "The home video has a real '70s quality to it. The 8 mm stuff has a quality that I think is much more beautiful. The video stuff was needed, though, as you really couldn't have captured many of the scenes they did without video. There's a scene where the video camera was dangling from David's hand, and all you see is the pavement. That perfectly captured the sense of things being completely out of control at that moment."

Jarecki's conclusions to the film are decidedly inconclusive. Whether or not Papa Friedman, who was an admitted pedophile, actually committed these crimes, is left open for the audience to decide. "People get into very, very heated discussions after the film," reports Friedman, who is travelling with the film for opening weekend question-and-answer sessions across North America. "Cinema managers have been complaining because people haven't been leaving the cinemas after the final credits roll. People need to talk about it after seeing it.

"That's exactly what I was hoping for."

Capturing the Friedmans opens Friday, Aug. 8

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