She talks in that rather solemn halting way that makes certain people seem not only stupid

She talks in that rather solemn, halting way that makes certain people seem not only stupid but heartless. Describing her marriage to Arnold she recalls, “There was really nothing between us except for these children we yelled at”.Jarecki marshals all this with exemplary tact and impartiality and, as well as interviewing the family, draws on testimony from policemen, journalists, attorneys and several of the Friedmans’ alleged victims. Not surprisingly, hysteria bubbles just beneath the hilarity: there’s an awful lot of talking, but hardly any listening. The family dynamic is sadly divisive: the boys get along wonderfully with Arnold, but regard their mother with an impatience bordering on contempt. She cuts a fascinatingly bewildered figure, and provokes an ambivalent response: you feel sympathy for her in being deceived by her husband for so long, and for being excluded by her sons, yet you also register a lack of warmth and humour (her mouth is drawn down in almost a cartoon parody of lugubriousness). (Seth, the middle son, chose not to be interviewed, and Arnold had died in 1995).

We watch the family goofing around, arguing over dinner, talking about the case and, on the night before Arnold begins a prison sentence, prancing mambo-style around the living room. It transpired that the oldest son, David, had made videotapes of his family during the turbulent weeks and months leading up to the trials – tapes which Jarecki interleaves with his own interviews with Elaine, Jesse, David and Arnold’s brother, Howard. On Thanksgiving Day in 1987, the police raided the Friedman home and arrested Arnold and his 18-year-old son Jesse on charges of repeated sexual abuse of boys who attended the computer classes.This incendiary material would have been enough in itself for a film, but the director, Andrew Jarecki, also had an incredible stroke of luck. Unbeknown to him, a postal inspector intercepted the package; the authorities investigated, and uncovered a stash of child pornography in Arnold’s office, hidden behind the piano It was a harbinger of terrible things to come.

They had raised three sons, David, Seth and Jesse, and to judge from the Super-8 footage of their holiday frolics and high jinks they looked like a close, even happy, family. Their lives began to unravel one day in the mid-1980s when Arnold sent off for some child pornography from the Netherlands. Even in an age when reality TV has assaulted the notion of privacy in the name of public entertainment, Capturing the Friedmans delivers a punch that vibrates right down to your toes. Here is dysfunction to make the Osbournes look like the Partridge Family.
What surprises, and disturbs, is the apparent ordinariness from which tragedy sprang.