Tsuris enough to go round.

rmax304823

A complicated story from the late 1980s when mass hysteria about child abuse was raging throughout the country. In this case, the hatred centered on a genuinely twisted, if kind of nice quiet guy. Arnold Friedman, a nebbish, a good teacher, a husband and father of three sons in up-trodden Great Neck, Long Island, answers an ad planted by the sex police on some web site, about trading erotic photos of young boys or something. Unknowingly he sends a child porno magazine to the plant and when it is returned to him, he accepts it. The police, prompted by the postal inspectors, obtain a search warrant and find a stash of porno magazines hidden behind the piano in the basement, and some child porno games on his computer.

It turns out that Arnold not only owns illegal literature but he has been conducting computer classes in his basement for kids between 6 and 12 or something like that. The police run off a list of his students, interview all of them, and file over a hundred complaints of one or another kind of sexual abuse against him -- and against his son, Jesse, 17, who some of the students claim was involved in the various rapes and games of leapfrog and whatnot.

Good-bye Arnold. He's off to prison and ODs on anti-depressants. Jesse gets off with less.

This family falls apart under the stress. It wasn't exactly stable to begin with. The four males were opposed to the single female (Mom). Of course every family has arguments and unspoken alliances, but this one is beyond the pale. The kids actually seem to hate her. They're all over her, even at the Seder. She fights back well enough, but that really doesn't help matters.

As far as the story goes, it doesn't help matters that everybody seems to lie, not only to the camera but to each other. Sometimes one person tells us about a lie that another person told them. I kept waiting for someone to say that someone else lied to them about what another person had said to somebody long ago. And everybody seems so terribly PLAUSIBLE too. Not just the family members, but the police and the defense counsel we see interviewed. Jesse's lawyer, Polana or something like that, tells a thoroughly believable story of how, when asked directly if he could admit to sexual abuse in court, Jesse (with tears rolling down his face) looked Palano in the eye and said, "I can admit it." Jesse, equally credible, says that the abuse business was Palano's idea entirely and that Palano urged him to admit to it because, otherwise, Palano would have been allowing his client to lie in court, which is some kind of offense against the formal norms, subornation of perjury or malfeasance in the first degree or something.

It's a confusing story with no closure to it. (That's called verisimilitude.) You know what should have happened? They should have let Arnold Friedman get that magazine from Denmark, then masturbate while looking at his erotic literature or having his private fantasies, like 90 percent of the rest of the men on the planet. There is, of course, the possibility that he molested some young boys in that basement. There's no clear evidence that he did, only testimony from some of the kids who were obviously coached by the police. One of them managed to recall the memory of abuse only under hypnosis, which has been thoroughly discredited. Of course, erotic materials and the defendant's innocence aside, there is the question of whether or not Arnold might have "slipped" a little. He was a confirmed bisexual until at least in his forties, and fantasized about young boys. Might he not have bounced some boy on his lap at one time?

Who knows? In an unusually candid letter to a journalist Arnold claimed not. I don't know if he did or not. That's known as reasonable doubt.

I keep waiting for the next wave of hysteria to take off. We seem to need to organize our hatred and aim it somewhere on a periodic basis. We've demonized smokers, marginalizing about one quarter of the population, and we get as much pleasure as we can from that. We're beginning to work on fat people now. The signs are all over the place. But is that really enough? You can despise smokers and fat people but you can't become easily enraged, and you can't put them away for thirty years. We need something more. Something really evil. "Internet predators" will provide a suitable target in every way, although nobody knows what an internet predator is yet, or even if they exist. Well, I'll tell you what. If they don't exist, let's invent them.

score /10

rmax304823 10 July 2004

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0907978/