Stevie

Couldn't tear my eyes away from the screen...
Steve James, the director of Hoop Dreams, comes back to rural Illinois to make a movie about the little boy who became a man, Stevie Fielding. Steve J was his "Big Brother" once upon a time. He grew up with a mother that didn't want him, never knew his birth father, had a past of being abused and neglected, and basically was passed around all of the foster homes in Illinois.

The movie focuses partially on the trouble that Stevie has gotten into over the years, and the pending prison time he may have to do, because of some alleged crime he had committed during filming.

Stevie's life is a train wreck, impossible to turn away from. It is obvious that he has had severe emotional scars that have traveled with him into adulthood, and sometimes he just seems like a 28 year old child. He doesn't want to take responsibility for anything he has done. His life is an open book to those he talks to, as if he doesn't have any remorse for the major and minor crimes he has committed...

Disturbing true story shows results of a troubled childhood
When I heard about this 2002 documentary by Steve James, the director who brought us "Hoop Dreams", I just had to see it. "Stevie" is a disturbing look at a tortured life of a blue-eyed blond child who had a rotten childhood and grew up to become an abuser himself. When the director was in college, he was a "big brother" to the little boy but later moved away. After ten years, he returned to meet up with Stevie, now an in his twenties. Stevie had been in every foster home in Southern Illinois and got in trouble in all of them. When we meet him, he is living with his step-grandmother, hates his mother, has had a short abusive marriage, has never held a steady job, and has a mentally retarded girlfriend.

The film follows this troubled young man for 4-1/2 years and the director cannot help but take a good hard look at his own role in the film he is making. Right in front of us we see the result of years of neglect and abuse of the boy, now a man...

Steve and Stevie...
What I found most interesting about this documentary is that the filmmaker Steve James has a hard time separating himself from the subject Stevie. Whereas a lot of people walk away from this film feeling like Steve used Stevie's situation as an opportunity, I felt that the film was more of a reflection of how he feels that he's failed his "little brother". It would be easier for James to edit himself out of the film, to focus solely on Stevie and to take advantage of his situation, but instead he references himself shouldering some of the blame for the situation. I believe it was the filmmaker's intention to show himself at his most distasteful, it's part of the honestly of the film.

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