An American Hero Resides in ‘Babylon’

Robert Stone’s splendid documentary “American Babylon” opens with some stockfootage of a series of implosions that leveled Atlantic City’s immense old boardwalk hotels to make room for an array of gaudy new hotel casinos. The arrival of the gambling industry to the venerable New Jersey seashore resort has done little, however, for the city’s black ghetto.

Just two blocks away from the new strip, Atlantic City looks like the South Bronx, strewn with rubble, abandoned buildings and a haphazard array of row houses. Not surprisingly, it is an area steeped in poverty, crime and drugs.

It is a territory 38-year-old African American policeman Jeff Fauntleroy knows better than the back of his hand. He made it out of that neighborhood--his home is in a pleasant suburb--by joining the police force as he saw more and more of his childhood friends falling by the wayside. And when the job he’s held for 17 years threatened at last to overwhelm him, he turned to God for help. The month that Stone and his crew follow Fauntleroy around culminates with him giving his first sermon, and a triumphant one it is, at his local church.

Fauntleroy is an authentic American hero, and an enormously likable man as well. Strong and burly, Fauntleroy combines a religious man’s sense of inner joy with a streetwise cop’s hearty, outrageous sense of humor. No wonder he felt the need to develop a spiritual life in the course of doing a job that invites despair at every turn. Drug use is so pervasive that it would be easy for Fauntleroy--or any other cop--simply to say it’s hopeless.

Luckily, Fauntleroy gets a charge out of investigating and hunting down criminals, so many of them teenagers he tries to encourage to turn their lives around. He constantly faces down hatred and contempt, born of rage and frustration, yet he persists in insisting that if he can make it without resorting to criminal activities, so can others. (One embittered man, concerned with supporting his family, makes a telling point when he reminds Fauntleroy that he is one of the few black men he knows who had a father in the household when he was growing up.)

As if the ghetto beat weren’t enough, Fauntleroy and his fellow officers must deal with people jumping to their deaths from the top of casino parking structures, and in the course of filming, the force is faced with a labor strike on the part of casino workers, a hurricane-strength tropical storm in the offing, topped by the Miss America pageant with all the security measures that entails.

“American Babylon” is not a polished work, but its raw edginess is a good fit for the environment it explores, its mood enhanced richly by Joel Harrison’s bluesy score. Fauntleroy figures that if he can serve and protect in the streets, he can do the same in the pulpit. His story is a timely reminder that there are good, and in some instances extraordinary, policemen everywhere, doing their jobs without fanfare.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: language, adult themes and situations, some violence.

‘American Babylon’

A Stone Productions in association with Court TV presentation. Filmed and directed by Robert Stone. Producers David Heilbroner & Stone. Executive producer Anthony Horn. Original music composed and arranged by Joel Harrison. Editor Kate Davis. Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes.

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