Stevie

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.

I just saw Stevie today at a film festival and it really blew me away. Its harrowing to see the life of someone who was passed off from person to person and only rarely got a glimpse of a happier life. He is used as a pawn in the relationship between his grandmother and the mother who didn't want him (and took it out in abuse). Later he is sent through the foster care system where he is eventually raped. Bits of his medical record reveal the degree to which we can predict the effects that this sort of instability will bring to a person's life, which makes it all the more angering that noone was there to prevent it.

In one particularly powerful scene you see Stevie reunited with the kindest of his early foster parents and the joy it brings to him. There is almost a complete regression in him to a childlike state, like he is trying to restart his childhood at the point where he was happy.

Steve James does not try to excuse the heinous crime Stevie has committed, rather he forces you to see the complicity we all have in (including in a very real sense himself) allowing a system that ignores the needs of children.

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.

It's funny how many want to review the filmmaker instead of the film. Here we see a family of people who rarely know how to be happy, and the filmmaker himself does make some unwise decisions. But that's not the point; we can't expect Mr James to see around his own blind spots -- and yet sometimes he does, and so does Stevie himself.

I see this as something of a redemption film (even if that redemption is seriously flawed): every major participant comes to a better understanding through the events explored, sometimes with surprising clarity. No, their lives aren't going to be great; that's just not in the cards. But a lot of hard truth gets laid out, often from surprising sources (Patricia for the fiancee, Greg for the Steves). There are no easy or simple answers, except possibly to show the universality of human needs -- and faults. Recommended. 8/10

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...