MOVIE REVIEW : THE NEW AMERICAN TRAGEDY

You may be gripped by an overwhelming anger as you watch the street children of “Streetwise,” (Fox International) wheedling, bragging, dreaming, scavenging food out of dumpsters, rolling drunks, selling themselves and each other. Who were the adults who formed these emotionally destitute kids? What was done to children to make them think that this desperate half-life was what they deserved ?

That’s the underlying question posed by exceptional documentary film makers Martin Bell, Mary Ellen Mark (already world renowned as a humanistic photojournalist) and Cheryl McCall in this electrifying, tragic study of the 13-to-19-year-olds who survive on the streets of downtown Seattle.

You can hear the answers if you listen carefully to the kids’ intermittent phone conversations home, or watch 16-year-old DeWayne with his lifetime-felon father, or 14-year-old Tiny with her ineffectual, alcoholic waitress-mother.

The streets are “freedom”--from abusive stepfathers or neglectful mothers, from even the minimum demands of school. The streets require only the smarts to stay alive on them. And in their abandoned hotels the kids make their own insubstantial versions of what they most hunger for: a loving, accepting family.

Gradually, we begin to pick out individual faces from this shifting cast of teen-age panhandlers and runaways, pimps and drug dealers. There’s Tiny, the spitting image of her mother, to whom her daughter’s career as a prostitute is “just a phase.” Tiny has only contempt for her mother’s second husband, who lives off his wife’s waitressing money and has already broken his wife’s leg in one beating.

Tiny’s “dates” give her pocket money and an already well-established collection of venereal diseases. She saves her affection to lavish on her minuscule black puppy, and on Rat, a fast-talking 17-year-old whose runty frame makes him look about 12. The urgency of Tiny’s need for him makes Rat uneasy. He retreats, flirts with other girls in front of her--and we are left to watch the naked anguish on Tiny’s face.

Malnourished, lost little DeWayne, 16, with his bitten fingernails and chronically infected tonsils, is still amazingly open and sweet. (The film makers’ almost miraculously fine sound work is at its best in the jail-house conversations between DeWayne and his blustering arsonist-father, lecturing his son on smoking through the haze of his own chain-smoked cigarette.)

Shellie is 13, blond, new to the streets. Her pimp-buddy Shadow, 18 (who prefers the word playboy to pimp), moves her in with the street’s perfect couple, Patty and Munchkin.

As it turns out, this may not be the world’s greatest arrangement, but it’s better than life as one of the seven children of a 32-year-old mother, now on her third husband. Shellie was sexually abused by one of these stepfathers. Dark-haired Kim, 16, in her black-and-white bunny sweater, is another new arrival, an import from the suburbs. Pretty, definitely not bright, she is thrilled by the idea of the money she can make as a “ho.”

What these kids do for their livelihood--from “rolling queers,” in Rat’s words, to selling blood, to turning tricks--is grim, but they themselves are anything but. They are resilient, somehow not yet sapped of the ability to dream of a better life, but utterly without the means to bring that about. If Dreiser were searching about for the current American Tragedy, this scene, repeated in most of the major cities of the United States, would be it.

The film makers linger for an instant on one face in their frieze of downtown Seattle faces which should give all these youngsters cold chills: a ravaged bag lady, staring vacantly at them.

Without help, without education, without a drastic change in their conditions, it’s the face of their future. ‘STREETWISE’ A film by Martin Bell, Mary Ellen Mark, Cheryl McCall. Executive producers Angelika T. Saleh; Connie and Willie Nelson. Producer McCall. Director Bell. Editor Nancy Baker. Music Tom Waits. Camera Bell. Sound Keith Desmond.

Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature (strong language).