January 29

With just three days remaining on the Genre-ary for 2025, I watched an Oscar-nominated doc called Catching the Friedmans, another tough watch because it centered around a teacher and his son who had been accused of sodomy and sexual abuse of kids.

Director Andrew Jarecki, who was the director behind the amazing docu-series, The Jinx, was the driving force behind this documentary.

According to IMDB, the “Documentary on the Friedmans, a seemingly typical, upper-middle-class Jewish family whose world is instantly transformed when the father and his youngest son are arrested and charged with shocking and horrible crimes.”

There are plenty of scenes in this movie that came from home video recordings taped by the Friedman family themselves. Most of these scenes were really tough to watch considering the way some of this was portrayed. It painted a horrible picture of most of these people. There was a dramatic scene taped at Jesse Friedman’s trial of a parent chasing after him screaming that he had raped his son. Unbelievable.

Elaine Friedman seemed to be a spiteful woman, but it is hard to imagine the situation she found herself in daily. Her husband was a pedophile. Her sons hated her. A lot of the recordings by her kids had her screaming like a banshee. She did not come off looking well. Then, the final scene of the doc seemed to go against everything that the doc had shown us up until that point.

The doc sheds plenty of question on the case overall, especially when it came to Jesse. Arnold, the father who was an admitted pedophile, said that he had committed sexual abuse on two kids, but not the countless number at school.

I’m not sure how I felt about this doc because the voice seemed to be all over the place. I’m not sure what the doc was telling me about this story and it felt as if details changed throughout. I do not have a better understanding of what the truth was in this case or to what level these people were guilty or innocent. Maybe that is the idea with the doc… that truth may be elusive and that you may never know for sure what is happening in the heart of a family.