Andrew Jarecki's documentary for HBO rehashes a late-Eighties criminal case that never came to trial, in which a Jewish upper-middle-class family man and teacher in Great Neck, Long Island, already caught red-handed in possession of child pornography (postmark Amsterdam), was brought up on charges, together with the youngest of his three college-age sons, of molesting grade-school boys in the extracurricular computer class in his basement. Both defendants, for different reasons, ultimately pled guilty, but outside the courtroom both maintained their innocence. Everyone will have his own opinion, and it is to the film's credit that everyone will be moved to express it. The same, though, might be said about any round-table discussion of the crime du jour on Larry King Live -- the same, that is, except that Larry King Live is not a film. (Are we crediting the film or the crime?) Like King, Jarecki religiously refrains from imposing his own views, preferring to leave it up to the viewer to decide: you, the jury. As a piece of filmmaking, the patchwork of present-day interviews and archival clips and stills adds up to no more than a meat-and-potatoes documentary technique. What makes the film remarkable -- the gravy, as it were -- is that the clips go well past the standard TV nightly news footage (of which there is plenty) and extend to a whole boatload of home videos and audio tapes recorded throughout the ordeal. These, while oftentimes painfully revealing, still do not tell us everything we want to know. And in the last analysis, the film focuses too little attention on the range of possibilities in between the "nothing happened" line of the defense and the virtual Black Sabbath envisioned by the prosecution. There is an awful lot of smoke for there to be not a flicker of flame somewhere in the thick of it. For Jarecki, the choices seem to come down to "nothing" or all. For someone else, the choices could include infinite increments in between. Or in a word, something. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.