Stevie (2002)-Unrated

Run Time:140 minutes

4 stars out of 4

It is rare to find a film as personal and as honest as Steve James's Stevie (2002). This film is a documentary about the director himself, Steve James of Hoop Dreams (1994) renown, and his relationship with a very troubled young man named Stephen (Stevie, hence the title) Fielding, from the rural hamlet of Pomona in southern Illinois. James, who first met Stevie through a mentoring program at the University of Southern Illinois, became a 'Big Brother' to Stevie in 1985. Stevie, who was about 12 at the time, was a neglected child who never knew his real father, and was living with Verna Hagler, the mother of his deceased step-father. Stevie's mother, Bernice, had given previously given up Stevie to the state, where he had been horribly abused at underfunded and understaffed group homes. James formed a strong mentor relationship with Stevie, despite his problems, and had kept in touch with him for several years, until his film career took off and he left southern Illinois to live in Chicago. Returning years later, in the mid 1990's, James finds a grown-up Stevie living with a severe alcohol problem and an extensive criminal record, and still living with his aging step-grandmother. The documentary spans the next four or so years of Stevie's life, during the shooting of which Stevie gets into the biggest amount of trouble yet, with a serious felony charges that may result in a decade of prison time. This film took a great deal of courage for Steve James to make for a number of reasons. Made out of a mixture of guilt and curiosity on James's part, Stevie is brutally honest about James's own guilty conscience on abandoning his little brother when a mentor was needed most. No one is let off the hook in this film, least of all James himself, and at times the cameras seem intrusive into Stevie's family's life we see the even greater risk that James took by undertaking this film while trying to keep Stevie's family life from deteriorating further. The film itself, abnormally long for a documentary at almost two and a half hours, is also a gamble. The recording of the broken lives and homes of white trash living in poverty is a not a feat which can be pulled off easily while still giving them their dignity (for contrast see any John Waters movie). James, however, is able to bring out the humanity in his subjects in a way that is at times both excruciatingly painful yet honest and even beautiful. In terms of entertainment, Stevie utterly fails. Yet, for a viewer to look at it in this way is to sorely misunderstand the film. Stevie was not made for entertainment, just like one's life is not lived for entertainment. This film is instead a snapshot of Middle America is all its ugliness - the unemployment, the poverty, the alcoholism, the abuse. Yet it is at the same time a work of art. We see these poor, depressing people as humans, not just freaks or statistics, and are forcedly shown a head-on view of reality in America. Long and difficult as James's Stevie may be to watch, it is an important, unique, and fascinating piece of film.