When a filmmaker steps into the frame

When “Hoop Dreams,” the highly acclaimed documentary about two inner-city youths striving for basketball stardom, brought its maker, Steve James, to southern Illinois in 1995 in connection with its presentation, he contacted Stevie Fielding, a troubled youth to whom he had been a Big Brother between 1982 and 1985. At the urging of his wife, Judy, a counselor, he had signed on with the then-11-year-old Stevie while attending Southern Illinois University. In his journal he promised he would stay in touch with Stevie but never did.

Reconnecting with the now- 24-year-old man turned into a four-year filmmaking odyssey that resulted in “Stevie,” a film that raises as many questions about the nature of documentary-making as it does about the realities of America’s far-from-classless society. Issues emerge about the toll exacted upon children by dysfunctional family life and the further harm done by institutions ostensibly intended to help them. James ponders what being one’s brother’s keeper really means; there are no easy answers in a film that is all the more engrossing and challenging for being so problematic.

It’s commonly said of the documentary form that if the filmmaker has hit upon a terrific subject, he or she is halfway there. This is certainly the case with Stevie, born out of wedlock to a woman who abused him and who, when she married, turned him over to his step-grandmother, Verna Flagler, to raise. Flagler and her husband, who died in 1981, were told that they were too old to adopt Stevie, whose incorrigibility sent him to numerous foster homes in southern Illinois and subsequently to a variety of other institutions. James concludes that Stevie had endured every conceivable behavioral modification program, only to come away with the dangerous knowledge that he could resist every one of them.

In 1995, James found Stevie back living with the 81-year-old Flagler in her rural homestead of 50 years, and his mother, Bernice Flagler, widowed since 1988, in a mobile home nearby. Also living close by is Bernice’s daughter Brenda and her husband, Doug Hickam. Stevie has grown up to be the stereotypical trouble-prone redneck, a scruffy, tattooed, Harley-loving substance abuser. There is a wounded look in his eyes, and the intelligence that glimmers there is continually short-circuited by pure rage. He will expound at length on how he intends to murder his mother should she get him sufficiently riled up.

On the plus side, Verna’s steadfast love for Stevie is as palpable as her loathing of her daughter-in-law, and then there are Brenda and Stevie’s fiancee, Tonya Gregory, who are remarkable women in their quiet, loving strength. Brenda is clearly more intelligent than her relatives, determined to better herself. In Doug she has a supportive, loving husband who has a calming yet firm way with Stevie. Tonya has the sharp, irregular features of a Modigliani woman and a slowness of speech that belies a perceptive, reflective nature.

At this point, filmmaker James takes off again to pursue other projects, returning in 1997 to discover that Stevie has been charged with sexually molesting his 8-year-old niece. He adamantly denies his guilt even though he has signed a confession, which he claims was coerced from him. In light of his proud and stubborn nature, suspense develops about just how severe a fate awaits him at the hands of the justice system.

By now, James has become a player in his own film. He is forced to acknowledge that like so many others who tried to help Stevie, whom he has always regarded as difficult and draining to deal with, he eventually deserted him. In Stevie’s story, James has found dark despair in the classic pattern of child abuse repeating itself generation after generation, and also amazing repositories of love and tenderness and even a slender ray of hope for the possibility of redemption.

In short, James has struck cinematic gold with Stevie and his relatives, whom he has persuaded to participate in the making of his film -- even the defensive and guilt-ridden Bernice. He couldn’t have wished for a more dramatic turn of events in Stevie’s life to provide a fitting climax to his film, and he milks the long waiting period until Stevie receives his sentencing for all it’s worth, setting up encounters and situations to bring Stevie in contact with his past.

Of course, James is exploiting Stevie, but the peculiar power of this film lies in James’ indirect acknowledgment of it and his hope that his film has some point and value. Although it may be that exploitation to some degree is inescapable in the very nature of documentary filmmaking, the quotient here is pretty high as James strives to manage and seemingly stage events in Stevie’s life even as he strives to redeem his own lapses toward the man and to obtain the fairest and most constructive justice for him. James admits toward the end that he has come to believe the enigmatic Stevie agreed to the making of the documentary because he craved the filmmaker’s companionship, which may or may not be true, and that what he has done in return is put Stevie’s tormented life on film. The remark has an honest ring to it, but by then James has involved himself so deeply in his subject’s fate that even the most sincere and concerned-sounding remark seems inescapably self-serving.

There is in fact something irritating and intrusive in the sharp contrast between the yuppie attractiveness of James and his wife, with their proper liberal sentiments and their perfect restored Craftsman cottage, and the unprepossessing Stevie and his lumpy-looking family with their double-wides. (If one’s decor aesthetic is not anchored blindly to Mission oak, it is possible to notice that Brenda has decorated her modest home with considerable charm.) It can be said that in the course of “Stevie,” James has at times captured a sense of life being lived as we witness it; has engaged our hearts and minds; and has had the strength to pull together a long and ceaselessly provocative film to end on a note of conviction.

*

‘Stevie’

MPAA rating: Unrated.

Times guidelines: Language, substance abuse, complex adult themes.

A Lions Gate Films release of a Kartemquin Films and SenArt Film co-production. Director-producer Steve James. Producers Adam Singer, Gordon Quinn. Executive producers Robert May, Gordon Quinn. Cinematographers Dana Kupper, Gordon Quinn, Peter Gilbert. Music Dirk Powell. Editors Steve James, William Haugse. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

At selected theaters.