Thursday, May 29, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Brother's keeper

Stevie recounts the true tale of a victim of dysfunction

By Jeannette Catsoulis

There is perhaps no greater argument for the pass-down theory of abuse than 23-year-old Stephen Fielding. Snake-loving, trailer-dwelling, tattooed and tormented, Stephen is a textbook victim of dysfunction and instability. As filmmaker Steve James says in the first half of his bleak new documentary, Stevie, the young man is "an accident waiting to happen."

Back in 1985, as a graduate student at Southern Illinois University, James was encouraged by his girlfriend, Judy (now his social-worker wife) to become a Big Brother to the 13-year-old Stevie. After graduation, James moved to Chicago to pursue a filmmaking career (he directed Hoop Dreams) but claims to have been haunted by guilt over his abandonment of the troubled child. "I should have been there for him and, of course, I haven't been," says the perpetually doleful James, whose woebegone countenance gazes from the fringes of most of the scenes in the movie.

So in 1995 James returns to rural Illinois to catch up with Stevie, now a brawny, straggly haired specimen in muscle shirts and enormous, thick-lensed glasses. In a series of vérité interviews we learn of a childhood echoing with neglect, alcoholism and an entire menu of foster care abuses, including multiple rapes. Born out of wedlock to a mother, Bernice--who administered years of drunken beatings before dumping him on her new husband's mother, Verna--Stevie grew up detesting Bernice and mutters darkly at one point of his intention to kill her.

After a brief absence to film Prefontaine, James returns in 1997 to find Stevie accused of the molestation of an 8-year-old cousin. The incident has further fractured the already barely functioning family, and now James seems to realize his heretofore lackadaisical filming of Stevie has a real center of gravity, a raison d'�tre. Widening his investigation to include Fielding's shaggy, government-supported friends, James encounters both the hopeless and the hopelessly deluded--the latter a member of the Aryan Nation who offers to "make a call" to ensure Stevie's safety in prison.

With the hard pragmatism of those who have little use for reflection, most of these people believe he is guilty. As each new revelation about Fielding's blighted past surfaces, the resigned supportiveness of both his mildly retarded girlfriend, Tonya, and his surprisingly well-adjusted sister, Brenda, seems increasingly saintly; yet the boy's (it is difficult to call Stevie a man) vulnerability and lack of self-pity are enormously touching. Even the newly sober (and newly saved) Bernice seems determined to stand by her pathetically overconfident son.

Stevie is a courageous, mesmerizing film about the way poverty, ignorance and a lack of options can produce people who simply float free of society, untethered and essentially ungovernable. Quietly and with few cinematic flourishes, James places us in a world of trailers and trucks and rotting porches, where the Aryan Brotherhood rubs shoulders with tongue-babbling Pentecostals, and a Class X felony--criminal justice jargon for certain types of violent crime--raises few eyebrows. In this environment, Stevie's affecting reunion with the one set of loving foster parents he was ever assigned to is almost unbearably poignant.

Throughout, and with fascinating openness, James confesses to the ambivalence of his own motives, and the result is an intriguing subtext of moral and ethical conflict. "I was the idiot who...stood by filming as he went out of control," remarks James bitterly after a disastrous visit to Chicago by Stevie and Tonya. The filmmaker's pain seems genuine, and speaks to the fundamental friction at the heart of the entire documentary process. The possibility that James' soul-searching is itself presented as much for effect only makes his film that much more absorbing.