THE American stars and stripes are twisted and knotted into a hangman's noose on the billboard poster for Andrew Jarecki's documentary portrait of an ordinary New York family wrapped up in a foggy American tragedy.

Who or what is on trial here. Truth? Justice? American Law? The morals of a dysfunctional family? The mob lust for a witch hunt? Our fascination with freak shows?

Once it was the subject of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, and once more all come under the microscope in Jarecki's account of a complex, disturbing, appalling yet grimly fascinating documentary, whose title of Capturing The Friedmans carries a double meaning.

On Thanksgiving weekend in 1987, police in Great Neck, Long Island, frisked the house of respectable Arnold Friedman.

His family looked on as the computer studies teacher, family man and "beach bum" - his grave headstone's twisted verdict - was caught in possession of child pornography. He was duly charged with molesting young boys; so too was his 18-year-old youngest son, Jesse. Between them, they faced 245 counts of sodomy and child sex abuse.

Throughout the lead-up to the trial, and the trial itself, eldest son David videotaped family life, just as he and the family had always done, building up a stock of home movie tapes that had been gathering dust in a box since 1987.

David Friedman is New York's most successful children's party clown - it would be interesting to know if he had lost that status since Capturing The Friedmans was released - and Jarecki originally had been drawn to him when making a film about clowns.

He had wondered why a clown could have so much anger: the reasons rested within that old box.

To this day, David Friedman does not believe father or brother was guilty, and his video camera must have been seeking some form of cinema verit, or maybe he was merely trying to make sense of the mess.

What he does capture is a family in disintegration, as the frictions escalate between taciturn mother Elaine, slippery father Arnold and their three sons.

Jarecki intercuts Friedman's video diary with TV footage and interviews with the family (only the middle son declined to comment). Arnold Friedman's gay brother contributes too, and so do the police and judge and abuse victims.

The fog never lifts, and so a third meaning to the film title emerges.

The ultimate truth of the Friedman's story will never be wholly captured, but Jarecki has captured the reverse of the American Dream, the modern Greek tragedy of the American Nightmare.

Charles Hutchinson

Updated: 16:39 Thursday, April 15, 2004