Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on September 03, 2003 at 12:19:14

Make No Difference -- Duncan Shepherd strays into the realm of the DVD
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No genius of fictional construction could have come up with a more potent mix.

Review by Duncan Shepherd

To pick up from last week's postscript on the DVD release of Amen, and more generally on the increasing likelihood of a film reaching the DVD market before it can reach a provincial theater, I offer Exhibit A in evidence. I think it is now safe to say that with the scheduled release of Steve James's Stevie on DVD next Tuesday, I can quit scanning the horizon for its appearance at a local theater. That will not be happening. The Amen booking, it becomes clear, was a last-chance, last-gasp, last-stand sort of thing before the film transmigrated to another state. Stevie had no such stopover.
I first mentioned the film earlier in the summer at the time of the release of Capturing the Friedmans (they shared a theme of child molestation), when two months had already passed since its press-screening, but when I had not yet abandoned all hope of its own eventual release. I had thought after I saw it, way back last April, that it would immediately (or imminently) become a touchstone in the field of documentary filmmaking, setting a new standard for personal involvement on the part of a filmmaker. But that view of it was harder and harder to cling to in its continued absence, which could only be read as its apparent unworthiness of a showing -- an unworthiness perhaps demonstrated by poor box-office performance elsewhere. A film doesn't get to be a touchstone without being seen.

This was all the more galling in light of the ongoing press hoopla to do with the current upswing in documentaries, centering mostly on Rivers and Tides, Winged Migration, and Spellbound, in addition to the aforementioned Capturing the Friedmans: two PBS-y documentaries and two blown-up 48 Hours or Dateline segments. Love and Diane, which also appeared here this summer, albeit outside any national release pattern, was better than any of those four, but in stark contrast to Stevie was determinedly upbeat. Make no mistake. Stevie is not at all what the doctor ordered for the Make-a-Difference age. It is for the deepest and darkest of passing moods: the make-no-difference one. More bluntly, it is not for wimps. Hence, or partly hence, its absence from our screens, its apparent unworthiness of a showing. From that angle, the purported boom in documentaries looks more like a mere puff. Time may yet prove me right in my initial reaction to the film, but at the rate things are proceeding I can't expect to be around to see it.

To be writing about it as a DVD instead of as a first-run film takes away some of the incentive to write about it at all -- until, anyhow, I arrive at the point of conversion where DVDs wean me away from movie theaters altogether. (Can it ever really come to that? Or is the question simply how soon? A legitimate question to ask, certainly, at the end of a summer season in which the only mainstream Hollywood movie I actually wanted to see -- and I do mean the only -- was Open Range.) Besides which, my notes from last April are now yellowed and the ink faded, along with the memory.

Here are some of the basics. "The past is never dead. It's not even past," runs the ominous Faulkner quotation at the outset. In 1982, while a student at Southern Illinois, the future director of Hoop Dreams, Steve James, signed up to be the Big Brother of a troubled eleven-year-old in rural Pomona, Stephen "Stevie" Fielding, the illegitimate offspring of an alcoholic and brutal mother, handed over first to his stepgrandmother (living right next door), and then passed through a series of foster homes, in which somewhere along the line he was sexually abused: "He always seemed to be an accident waiting to happen." In 1995, guilt-ridden at having lost touch with Stevie, James sought him out again and brought along a camera crew, finding a childishly sulky adult who had come through a violent marriage and compiled an impressive rap sheet of petty crimes. The "waiting," in a sense, was over, but the worst was still to come. After a two-year hiatus -- time off to shoot the low-budget biopic, Prefontaine -- James discovers that in the interim Stevie has been charged with molesting an eight-year-old cousin.

No genius of fictional construction could have come up with a more potent mix. James's wife happens to be a counselor for sex offenders. They have children of their own. And James himself is thrust in front of the camera as a major character, a member of the family, together with the recalcitrant Stevie ("I don't need no damn therapy"); the latter's reformed and churchified mother, toward whom Stevie maintains what once might have been called a love-hate relationship, emphasis on hate; his enfeebled stepgrandmother, who remains bitterly at war with the mother; his married but childless stepsister ("Some people have kids and throw 'em in trash cans, and here I want a child and can't have one"), who miraculously becomes pregnant in the course of filming; and Stevie's slightly handicapped fiancée, whose uncensored facial expressiveness more than makes up for any verbal deficiencies. Between them, what a world of woe!

With James as our point of identification, if not life raft, the film draws us ineluctably into its web, where we can't simply dismiss Stevie (as we so easily could, in the handy stereotypes of Poor White Trash, Inbred Hillbilly, Redneck Geek, and the like, if we had seen only his arraignment on the nightly news) and can't extricate ourselves from the awful futility of the situation. A new leaf will be turned over (Stevie accepts Jesus to appease his mother), and a gust of wind will blow back a whole sheaf (he gets falling-down-drunk on camera), and just when you think you can't sink any lower you meet Stevie's white supremacist mentors, advising him on his looming prison term. And you watch in mingled despair and admiration as James tries to find a foothold in the discussion: better him than you.

As much as the film is a spectacle of bad teeth, bad hair, bad grammar, bad prospects, it is also a spectacle of the existential heroism of those who go on trying to help someone who is miles past helping. A spectacle, from another viewpoint, of family. (What a comfort it is, and what a brief one, to meet a couple of decent, caring foster parents from Stevie's boyhood: a little pastoral interlude on the grim march of destiny.) And though the image, too, is bad -- I suspect that on DVD or VHS it will look, as Hoop Dreams looked, like taped TV -- the badness is thoroughly offset by the alertness of the camerawork. (One of the cameramen, Peter Gilbert, worked on Barbara Kopple's American Dream, another intensely present-tense documentary, unfolding its events before your eyes.) I challenge anyone to find a scene, in any film fictional or nonfictional this entire year, to match in dramatic tension the scene where Stevie goes out for some air while his fiancée visits a comparably handicapped girlfriend in the hospital, and the topic of conversation swings around to the friend's childhood molestation just before Stevie re-enters the room. The cameraman is brilliantly on the ball.

I said when I mentioned it in passing last June that the film is hard to watch. This calls for some qualification. A lot of films, for a lot of different reasons, are hard to watch. More and more of them, I find. (2 Fast 2 Furious, etc.) Some of them are utterly unwatchable. (Bad Boys II, etc.) Watching any of these does not put you in line for a medal of honor. That's the difference. Stevie, to pay it a common compliment, is truly "involving," but to an uncommon degree. It "involves" every available scrap of your intelligence, your emotion, your empathy, your self-recrimination, your perseverance, your humanity. Most moviegoers do not really care to get so deeply involved. My sadness about Stevie is therefore doubled (if you see what I mean) by my sadness about Stevie. One after the other they fell through the cracks.

©2003 San Diego Reader.