Stevie

I watched Stevie last night at work...I work in a children's home with young children who were sexually abused or are sexual offenders (the kids were asleep when I watched this). He spent six years of his life in a place like this which was supposed to help him. It's very hard to get through to kids like this and even though people like me try, the kids do not get the therapy they so desperately need. Did anyone see the way Stevie backed down when faced with anyone that was dominant or made him responsible for his actions? His family and the filmmaker were enablers and told him what he wanted to hear and never addressed the issue. If he were to be held responsible for his actions all his life by the people he cared about and respected and not just told things to pacify him, maybe he would be a different person. I thought that this was a wonderful documentary and it makes me take the work that I do much more seriously because I see how it can turn out.

As a documentarian, Steve James has a lot to learn, especially about editing. STEVIE rings in at more than two and a half hours but should have been cut to 90 minutes or less. In any film, every scene needs to count, to have a narrative purpose, and a movie needs to have some definite dramatic shape and narrative drive to hold its audience and justify its running time. STEVIE doesn't exhibit any of these qualities. In fact, it's an overlong, meandering mess that soon becomes a very tedious viewing experience. Bad form is one thing but bad faith is something else entirely. To be blunt, the implicit class politics of this film really suck. Steve James says he is making a film about Stephen Fielding out of a sense of guilt for not having kept up with Fielding in the decade since serving as Fielding's Big Brother. Maybe the guilt is real but the film smacks of a kind of pitying bourgeois condescension toward "white trash" life that conceals what is at base a lurid, voyeuristic fascination with the awful ignorance, dysfunction, and backwardness of the rural poor that get educated yuppies morally exercised but also affords them an exhiliarating sense of their own superiority. Much of middle America is a wasteland of bigotry, violence, ignorance, susperstition, and sloth. The film's implicit message? Aren't we glad we're not them...

I had a tough time watching the scene where the camera is on Steve James as Tonya tells him that at least something good came of all this, that at least a film was made about Stevie. I didn't like how long they allowed the camera to catch Steve's emotional reaction and it seemed a little too obvious...like the scene in Broadcast News where William Hurt whips up some tears to show on camera. I don't like that kind of manipulation. However, that being said, I don't mean to imply that Steven James wasn't sincere in his reaction; it was his editing choice that seems insincere.

It's a complicated film. Just like Stevie the person, there are no easy answers; unlike Stevie the person, life is not simply black and white. I do think the title reflects many things: the subject as he is now, the director's memory of Stevie the little boy, and the director himself. I don't believe that Stevie was exploited, but there is something in the intention of the film that is unsettling. And I think that unsettling feeling is an okay thing to have. If I taught a film class, this is a film I would definitely want to use to explore the nature of point of view, the ethics of documentary film-making, and the nature of simply being human.

I adored Tonya's friend in Chicago. Tonya, her friend, and Wanda reflect the very best about people and shatter easy stereotypes. These are all smart, independent, warm, thoughtful women, which is just wonderful to see in a documentary film.

According to sociologists, we are a product of our own culture. Naive about the true reality of others, many of us blithely make pronouncements about what people should or should not do to have a good life. Then a movie like "Stevie" comes along - a movie that shows a complex, rough-edged world in which there are no simple answers. To me, "Stevie" was kick-in-the-teeth reality - not voyeurism.

This movie reminded me of a number of other movies that give one a view into how others live... The "Bicycle Thief," "Chan is Missing," "The Harder They Come," "Milagro Beanfield War," "The Postman," "Secrets and Lies," and "Ping Pong," to name a few. I thought the director of "Stevie," the OTHER Steve, did an excellent job of showing people and their environment without trivializing them. I *cared* about the people in this film; I wanted them to love each other, work out their problems, and overcome their secrets and lies. Like my own real life, however, things don't always get tied up nicely in a pretty bow.

I think that "Stevie" is an excellent snap/slap of cold water for those of us who think we know it all. Life isn't simple, whether we're up to our necks in alligators or see ourselves as the alligator hunter.

This, to my mind, is how a documentary should be. The filmmaker makes no direct appeal for sympathy, he doesn't try to explain things, he just shows what is and lets the involved parties state their versions of what happened. In short, he documents: he does not propagandize.

Rarely have two and a half hours of viewing slipped by so rapidly for me. I was near tears at the end of it--not because my emotions had been "tweaked" or played with by the film's creator, but simply out of a feeling of despair for our miserable human condition. This superb film lays a lot of truths about humanity pitilessly bare.

I cannot recommend it highly enough.