Steve James Documentary Stevie Update Windows
Steve James' STEVIE now on Netflix., Kartemquin is building on more than 50 years of history as Chicago’s documentary. Get film updates and special.
The movie is by, who directed the great documentary ' (1994). For years, people asked him, 'Whatever happened to those kids?'
-to the two young basketball players he followed from eighth grade to adulthood. James must often have wondered about the kid nobody ever asked about, Stevie. While he was a student at Southern Illinois University, Steve was a Big Brother to Stevie, but he lost touch in 1985, after graduating. Ten years later, he went back Downstate, to the town of Pomona, 10 or 15 miles down the road from Carbondale, to seek out Stevie. That must have taken some courage, and even on his first return James must have suspected that this story would not have a happy ending. But it has so much truth, as it shows an unhappy childhood reaching out through the years and smacking down its adult survivor.
Here are a few facts, for orientation. Stevie Fielding was not wanted.
He was born out of wedlock, does not know who his father is, was raised by a mother who didn't want him, was beaten by her. When she did marry, she turned him over to her new husband's mother to raise. He also made a circuit of foster homes and juvenile centers, where he was raped and beaten regularly.
When we meet Stevie again, he is 23 and not doing well. His tattoos and Harley T-shirt express a bravado he does not possess, and he makes a poor impression with haystack hair, oversize thick glasses and bad teeth.
The most important person in his life is his girlfriend, Tonya Gregory, who on first impression seems slow, but who on longer acquaintance reveals herself as smart about Stevie and loyal to him. His stepsister Brenda is also a support, a surrogate mother who seems the best-adjusted member of his family, perhaps because, as her husband tells us, 'they didn't beat her.' Stevie freely expressed hatred for his mother, Bernice ('Some day I am going to kill her'), and she is one of the villains of the piece, but having stopped drinking, she feels remorse and even blames herself, to a degree, for Stevie's problems-especially the latest one. Between 1995, when James first revisits Stevie, and 1997, when production proper started on this documentary, Stevie was charged with molesting an 8-year-old girl.
Stevie says he is innocent. Even Tonya thinks he is guilty.
We do not forgive him this crime because of his tragic childhood, but it helps us understand it-even predict it, or something like it. And as he goes through the court system, Tonya stands by him, Brenda helps him as much as she can and Bernice, his mother, seems slowly to change for the better-to move in the direction she might have taken if it had not been for her own troubles. There is no sentimentality in 'Stevie,' no escape, no release.
Brenda Hickam
'The film does not come to a satisfying ending,' writes the critic David Poland. He wanted more of a 'lift,' and so, I suppose, did I-and James.
Netflix Documentary Stevie Update
But although 'Hoop Dreams' ended in a way that a novelist could not have improved upon, 'Stevie' seems destined to end the way it does, and is the more courageous and powerful for it. A satisfying ending would have been a lie. Most of us are blessed with happy families. Around us are others, nursing deep hurts and guilts and secrets-punished as children for the crime of being unable to fight back. To watch 'Stevie' is to wonder if anything could have been done to change the course of this history. James' big-brothering was well-intentioned, and his wife, a social worker, believes in help from outside.
But this extended family seems to form a matrix of pain and abuse that goes around and around in each generation, and mercilessly down through time to the next. To be born into the family is to have a good chance of being doomed, and Brenda's survival is partly because she got out fast, married young and kept her distance. Philip Larkin could have been thinking of this family in his most famous poem, whose opening line cannot be quoted here, but which ends: Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.
Search the Web using the first two lines, and you will find a poem that Stevie Fielding might agree with.
'Stevie,' the latest documentary by one of the modern masters of the form, Steve James of Chicago's Kartemquin Films, is a film so troubling and unflinchingly honest, that watching it becomes a test of empathy and compassion. James' 'Hoop Dreams' has a subject easy to get behind-the story of two likable inner-city African-American kids trying to achieve dreams of basketball stardom and, in some ways, getting rooked by the system. But 'Stevie' is harder stuff. It is the disquieting tale of a dysfunctional family in rural Southern Illinois, and the 'monster' they seemingly produce: a gap-toothed, balding, long-haired, tattooed, profane, chronically unemployed troublemaker named Stevie Fielding, who has lived a life of institutionalized rebellion and petty crime.
Judy James
During the course of this film, Stevie was arrested and prosecuted for sexually molesting his own 8-year-old cousin. Most probably, the film concludes-and so do we-Stevie is guilty of that and much else. For some, Stevie will be the ultimate loser and maybe the ultimate nightmare: poor white trailer trash living in a nondescript rural town (Pomona, Ill.), with a physically challenged girlfriend and a feuding family (a mother who beat him and the elderly step-grandmother who brought him up). He is an outcast with no special aspirations and few enjoyments beyond booze, sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll-and a little fishing with his buddy. Why is Stevie so interesting to James and why does he consider him a good subject for a probing 2 1/2 hour documentary? Because, we soon learn, James has known him since Stevie was a troubled 11-year-old and James became his Big Brother while attending Southern Illinois University. And because he is torn with guilt at having abandoned Stevie twice: first, by leaving Carbondale when Stevie was in his early teens to emigrate to Chicago and a filmmaking career, and second, by having lost touch with him again after starting this film in 1995-the two year interlude during which James made 'Prefontaine' and Stevie was arrested.
It is James' remorse at having been in close contact with a human being whose life is now unraveling but who trusted him-first as a role model and second as a filmmaker-that makes this film so riveting and poignant. The child Stevie, we learn, was constantly beaten by his mother and then raped and beaten during his tours of state orphanages and foster homes. While that hardly excuses his life of crime, it goes far toward explaining it.The movie, we see, is not just about Stevie's failure and loss, but about James' as well-and also that of Stevie's family and the larger society around them all.
James' socially active wife Judy, who works with sex offenders and troubled kids and urged James to get involved in the first place, at one crucial point argues her husband out of lending Stevie money to get out of jail. We can understand Judy's attitude-she is a mother with three small children and in her eyes, Stevie must seem a potential threat to them all-but that's part of the film's core of sadness.
By the end, we understand almost everybody and everything and still feel a certain powerlessness to address or change things. This sense of impotence is never stronger than in the scenes when Stevie makes the second mistake (after his crime) that will damage his whole life: turning down a plea bargain arranged by his lawyer, who got his confession thrown out, a deal under which he would have submitted to psychiatric counseling instead of serving jail time. When Stevie, with adolescent macho disdain, dismisses the female lawyer who saved him and scornfully refuses the counseling ('I don't need no damn shrink talkin' to me') he puts himself back on a road to institutionalization-which accelerates when his confession is reinstated by another judge. 'I just don't know what it is about Stevie, but I love him,' says his longtime girlfriend Tonya Gregory. And Tonya becomes the film's beacon; it is through her that we catch a glimpse of the lost boy whose charm affected many around him, including James. Tonya, who has a heavy speech impediment, also seems one of the sweetest and most perceptive people in the film. It is an insistent theme of this film that every life-not just Stevie's, but that of every person we see-has value and validity, and that everyone deserves a fair break.
That archetypal liberal sentiment will probably be rejected by hardcore Darwinists or ultra-conservatives in the audience; they may find some solace in the fact that this is also a film about the weaknesses of modern liberalism as embodied by James himself. James may have failed as a Big Brother. But he succeeds as filmmaker because of his even-handedness and devotion to his subjects, his determination to get the story right, even at his own expense. One of the reasons 'Hoop Dreams' is such a great movie, and 'Stevie' such a good one, is that, after a while, we implicitly trust his judgement and choices. We never feel the movie is holding back on us or trying to manipulate our responses. 'Stevie' like 'Hoop Dreams,' is deeply human, consummate reportage.
`Stevie' (star)(star)(star)1/2 Directed and written by Steve James; photographed by Dana Kupper, Gordon Quinn, Peter Gilbert; edited by James, William Haugse; music by Dirk Powell; produced by James, Adam Singer, Quinn. A Lions Gate Films release of a Kartemquin Films/SenArt Films production; opens Friday. Running time: 2:25.
No MPAA rating. (for language and frank discussions of sexuality, sex crimes, violence and drug use).