Ray Pride

Documentaries are about truth. Great documentaries are about lives.

That's the tradition honored by Kartemquin Films, the thirty-five-year-old Chicago production company. "Hoop Dreams" was the 1994 gem from the group, several of whom are involved in Steve James' "Stevie," a portrait deeper, denser and darker than that hopeful classic. Through the Big Brother program while in graduate school at Southern Illinois, James had mentored a 10-year-old ball of confusion named Stevie Fielding. Many years later, James decided to take a short visit to see how Stevie had fared since, unaware than he had set out on a journey that would take more than five years of shooting. Shortly after his first visit, the angry, confused Fielding was accused of a terrible crime. James follows the pathways of justice and the cycles of abuse that eddy over the generations of Stevie's family, and those whom Stevie knew over his lifetime. While challenging our country's clichéd preconceptions about poor Southerners and about family bonds, "Stevie" is at its core a painfully empathetic, richly etched portrait of a 27-year-old man who has confounded everyone, who has been failed by everyone who's tried to help or love him. Yet we also get glimpses of his lonely, angry step-grandmother, the once abused mother of his young victim, members of the community shocked at Stevie's actions, and most importantly, his learning-impaired girlfriend, Tanya. She radiates hope and love even at the most confusing of times, and her hopeful words at the movie's end, about why "nobody should be lonely," is a moment of radiance, even transcendence.

James worked closely with Kartemquin Films partner Gordon Quinn and Adam Singer during the film's long process, and they were instrumental in insisting that he make himself a character in his own film. Exquisitely paced, it's a generous feat of empathy, showing how we must look closer at life, as it's not a novel, but inevitably a tragedy. James didn't intend to be a character in his story. "On the first trip down, we decided it made sense to at least do some amount of the filming with me included. Given the personal nature of the approach to this story, it seemed best to have the initial reunion with Stevie [take place] on camera. I did it with reluctance. I've never been a particular fan of the diary film. I've always been pretty suspicious of filmmaker's motives when they include themselves in their films. Part of what made me feel okay about being on camera at first was knowing that as director and editor, I could decide to include it in the final film or leave it out."

But the original modest goals slipped away. "I spent a lot of time grappling with whether it was right to even continue making the film. My journal throughout the making of the film is full of entries questioning my own motives and trying to come to grips with the fact that no matter how much I was castigating myself, I was going to continue making the film. The entries also show my struggle to deal with Stevie himself. How should I treat him? Should I hold him accountable for the crime even though he claimed to be innocent? How could I best help him if--as I firmly believed--he was guilty? These and other questions made me realize that if the film was going to be honest at all, I had to be more willing to insert myself into it. I was never really intending to make an objective portrait of Stevie, but now I knew that I needed to be more involved in his life, movie or no movie. And that if I was going to continue to make the movie, I had to include that. If this sounds like a step-by-step rational realization, it was anything but. `Stevie' is both the most honest film I have ever made and perhaps will ever make. And it was also the most personally painful."

I wondered how "Stevie" sits within documentary practice, or more specifically, the Kartemquin tradition. "Good question. I am now, I realize, part of that tradition. `Hoop Dreams' built on their verité tradition of doing socially relevant stories, though no Kartemquin film that I know of had spent years following subjects. And I think that `Stevie' as a film, it tries, anyway, to paint a very complex portrait of Stevie, his fiancée, his family, and the social service and legal system, a portrait in which there are gray areas and no easy answers. Kartemquin's films have often been complex but usually there are clear-cut characters that the audience roots for. `Hoop Dreams' was no exception. With "Stevie,' the viewer's feelings about the subjects, myself included, are complicated and at times troubling."

James says the form of the film, like other Kartemquin work, was dictated by the lives they observed. "Once the crime was committed, we knew that we wanted to follow the story until `Stevie' either went free or to prison. That took over four years. I've always considered myself the tortoise of directors. The hares are the guys that can make films or commercials good and fast. I am best chipping away at things. The thing about long-term storytelling that I find most satisfying is the relationships one builds with characters. People surprise me all the time in real life. In movies they rarely do. And I think that in a film if you stay with people long enough you end up with a true and surprisingly real portrait, not a snapshot. And that's infinitely more interesting. Long-term storytelling also makes you feel like you are living inside an unfolding novel. With `Hoop Dreams' I felt like I was in some modern-day Dickens novel. With `Stevie,' it was more like modern-day Faulkner."

"Stevie" opens Friday at Landmark Century.

(2003-03-26)

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