STEVIE (Steve James, 2003) R

Reviewed: April 2nd, 2003

It's no secret that fictional, filmic narratives are personal mirrors, holding their crafters up to intense scrutiny, often telling us more about the movie-maker's obsessions and predilections than about any of the characters who are actually appearing on screen. What might be more surprising to realize is that this since-the-dawn-of-cinema trend seems to have heavily infested the documentary world of late, with (relatively) recent non-fiction work like Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I, Mark Moskowitz's Stone Reader and Bowling for Columbine functioning as personal essays. Stevie, like those films, is about -- as much as anything else -- its maker actively struggling with (and sometimes against) his own movie, frequently trying to understand just why he embarked upon this particular cinematic journey in the first place. So yes, the titular Stevie refers to both a twenty-something, severely disturbed, endlessly fascinating and completely endearing malcontent, but also to the documentary's maker, Steve James. James was a "big brother" to Stevie over ten years ago and the film often comes across as James's act of contrition viz. his wracking guilt over his decision to abandon Stevie once his involvement in the "big brother" program ceased over a decade previous. This kind of motivational tug of war -- with James sometimes wondering aloud on his narration track if he'd just irresponsibly let Stevie do something (like heavily drinking at a nightclub) merely so he could film him doing it, while acknowledging as a counterpoint to his (possibly) soiled motives that Stevie's motives are probably heartbreakingly pure (that is, Stevie only agreed to be in this movie because he wanted to spend time with James) -- endows the film with one of its many layers of opposing forces and propulsive drama.

All the other layers involve a fertile, textured stare into family tragedy, into how familial love (and the absence thereof) shapes who we become and who we don't; it's an examination of the ties that bind and then break and then can never be mended. It's an all access pass into human formation which never seems to push any single side of Stevie's story too forcefully: a lot of the drama involves Stevie's alleged sexual molestation of an 8 year-old girl, and though James tells Stevie point blank he thinks he's guilty, James also makes sure to provide all existent evidence to the contrary, such as the fact Stevie's confession was made under duress; at another moment James says in voice-over he's not out to make an Evil-Mother-Ruined-Angelic-Stevie film, and though that intent seems to be sincere the conclusion Stevie's mom is largely responsible for how he turned out struck me as fairly inescapable. Thus trends emerge: the irreplaceable import of familial support; the notion that familial violence and abuse is a disease passed from generation to generation, and that a child void of love, constantly abandoned, beaten and raped (all of which Stevie was) before he's even an adolescent runs a dangerously high risk of inflicting those same troubles onto others. Another idea that emerges -- and granted none of these are novel ideas, but then again, what is this days?; to be so maddeningly, scarily close to them is the real draw here -- is that state-run institutions fail their denizens all too often. Stevie was in every institution in his state by the time he was a teenager and it didn't make a lick of difference; yet if he'd stayed with his first, loving foster parents we get the distinct sense things just might have turned out alright. The sad comparison of Stevie to a child is also made; his lack of developmental progress, his lack of educational framework and his lack of a desire or an ability to move forward past his horrific troubles all contributes to the feeling he might not ever mature. We understand why Stevie's engaged to a mentally disabled woman, as if it's her disability and the childlike innocence it provides her that is the biggest attraction (likewise one of Stevie's smoothest interactions occurs with his girlfriend's even more disabled best friend). Watching a wrenching documentary as weighty and vigorous as Stevie makes me wanna fall back on the old truth v. fiction cliches: i.e. you can rarely write characters as byzantine as these real life people, you can rarely create drama as shattering as this real life dynamic, and closure -- if it even exists at all -- is tough as shit to come by in the real, somber world.

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