“Capturing The Friedmans”

Tonight at 9 on HBO

(four stars)

IF you missed the 2003 theatrical release of “Capturing the Friedmans” – perhaps the most disturbing, bizarre, and honest film of the year – you’re in luck.

HBO is airing it tonight.

The Friedmans were (emphasis on were) your average, upper middle-class, Long Island Jewish family from Great Neck. Dad was a schoolteacher with sidelines as a piano-player, computer whiz, physicist – and secret pedofile. Or maybe not.

The family – Dad, Mom, and three healthy, hearty boys – began devolving one Thanksgiving day, when the police broke down the door to ransack the house and arrest the father, Arnold Friedman, and his youngest son, Jesse, for sexually sodomizing young boys in their basement during computer lessons. The year was 1988.

Now here’s where the story gets bizarre. Not only had the Friedmans always filmed and documented most of their day-to-day lives – beginning in the early 1950’s with Arnold Friedman’s home movies of his little sister who shortly thereafter died of blood poisoning – but continued filming themselves all the way through Arnold and Jesse’s trial.

That’s including private, family arguments at home and the nightmarish, behind-closed-doors family brawls in court chambers.

It’s almost unbearable to watch, to digest and to believe. I’ve seen the movie twice now, and I still can’t decide whether Arnold and son were pedophiles or victims.

I think Jesse was probably railroaded by the cops, the computer-class kids and the courts. But when he says his lawyer Peter Panaro wanted him to cop a plea and admit his guilt even though he wasn’t guilty, it’s hard to believe.

Panaro says he begged the kid not to cave into his mother’s pressure to plead and urged him to go to trial if he was innocent.

What you will find to be true without doubt, however, is that father Arnold was sent away for a child porn magazine (this was before the internet became Kiddie Porn Central) and having a stash of child porn in his office when the cops came to search.

Still, it is almost impossible to buy the 245-counts of sexual abuse leveled against father and son.

Why? For one thing, it was the police who found the list of kids enrolled in Arnold’s computer classes and it was the police who sought the children out.

Not one kid, meantime, had bothered to tell his parents about the group sex with the old fogie that cops alleged took place – nor had any boy reported it to his teacher, his guidance counselor or the police.

These children supposedly were made to play naked leap-frog with Arnold and Jesse jumping over them and anally abusing them. But it wasn’t until they were questioned by the police that this come to light.

In the end, the mother, clearly strange herself, is the one blamed by the boys for all their troubles.

So how did filmmaker Andrew Jarecki find the incomprable home movies and get the families cooperation 14 years after the fact? Hold onto your clown hats.

Turns out that one of the brothers, David, is the most successful kiddie-party clown in New York (stage name: Silly Billy). When Jarecki set out to make a movie about party clowns, they chose Silly Billy, who eventually spilled the beans about his family’s past and gave them the footage.

“Just a Clown” is the short film Jarecki was making about Silly Billy when gold fell in his lap. The clown documentary is, in it’s own bizarre way, as weird as “Capturing The Friedmans” – but without the family trauma and dysfunction.

I mean, how many times do you get normal housewives to discuss having sexual affairs with a party clown? (HBO is showing it Friday night at 7:30 p.m.)

All in all, you won’t believe your eyes, your ears or your brain.