stevie (2003)
			director:  steve james stephen fielding, steve james unfashionable observations rating: A-				Stevie tells the haunting, heartbreaking true story of Stevie Fielding, a young man who is the paradigmatic product of his own environment.  He is what surrounds him.  He is not an individual in any real sense of the word.  Rather, he is a curious, ultimately tragic compound of lovelessness, hatred, despair, poverty, loneliness, and child abuse.  When he is accused of sexually abusing a minor, we are at once repulsed by the very proposition, but paradoxically unwilling to condemn him for it.  At least not entirely. Director Steve James used to mentor Stevie Fielding as a “Big Brother” back in the early 1980s.  Over ten years later, James returns to Stevie’s hometown of Pomona, Illinois to reclaim their lost friendship.  What James discovers is that things haven’t really changed during the intervening period.  Stevie was a troubled boy back then, and he is a troubled adult now.  At one point, James expresses sincere regret for leaving Stevie’s life altogether—deserting him—ten years earlier.  Perhaps there was something more that he could have done for him—something that would have halted Stevie’s downward spiral.  Perhaps. As Stevie describes his run-ins with the law, his bouts of depression, his grand sense of bravado, his broken family situation, and his thoughts on love and heartache, we are converted to helpless voyeurs, hanging on his every word.  Although he is an avowed criminal with a questionable sense of morality, we can almost forgive him on account of his unbridled honesty.  He bares his soul to the camera, and that in and of itself somehow makes him seem more real than most of the people with whom we interact on a daily basis.  He is flawed, but he is human, and tragically so.  The power of this documentary lies in the fact that it presents us with a moral dilemma that is all too real: Can we condemn Stevie for his alleged acts of child abuse when Stevie himself was a victim of such travesty?  We cannot merely discuss this in the abstract.  These events happened, and indeed we watch as they unfold.  At the very least, this documentary exposes the especially precarious nature of modern man’s sense of morality and ethics.  Life simply does not fit into moral categories as neatly as we’d like.  Certainly, Stevie's story does not.  And that is at once awe-inspiring, and terrifying. I’d give Steve James’ Stevie an A-.
	Unfashionable Observations © 2003