Documentary explores sad state of affairs for 'Stevie'

As any mentoring Big Brother -- or Big Sister -- can tell you, you never know who you're going to be assigned and how different his/her world might be from your own.

When future filmmaker Steve James was a student at Southern Illinois University, he applied for a little brother, thinking he might get a kid who was interested in sports. Instead, he was assigned an 11-year-old bundle of damaged goods named Stephen Dale (Stevie) Fielding.

Stevie was born to a father whose identity he never knew and to an alcoholic mother, Bernice Hagler, who beat him even in his infancy. He was sent next door to live with his step-grandmother, Verna Hagler, when Bernice married Verna's son Arvyle, who is now long since deceased.

The women loathed each other. Verna provided a roof but little influential direction for the boy ("He was not all there," she recalls), who moved through several foster homes, being raped at least once, plus stays in mental hospitals and jails in and around Pamona, Ill.

James had lost contact with the boy after graduating in 1985. Besides, James had a wife, Judy, who is a professional counselor to sex offenders, and three children. And he made the acclaimed 1994 documentary "Hoop Dreams" about high school basketball players.

He came to feel guilty and curious about his lapsed relationship with Stevie. James looked him up in July 1995 and began shooting what was to become "Stevie," then went off to film "Prefontaine" (1997).

When James returned to "Stevie" in March 1997, he found that his subject was in jail on charges of molesting an 8-year-old female cousin.

James renewed filming in earnest, with an objectivity that you don't find in puff piece pseudo-documentaries. He had access to all of the surviving people in the story, including Stevie's younger half-sister, Brenda Hickam, who worked at being a big sister, and her husband, Doug.

And then there's Tonya Gregory, Stevie's loyal girlfriend, who seems, at first, to be impaired but who gradually reveals herself to be as smart as she is dependent on his companionship.

In his persistent filming over a five-year period, James uncovers the dynamics within a classically dysfunctional family. He finds that Stevie, like so many people we know, finds others to blame for everything. Stevie lives by a self-protective indifference and an unsophisticated strain of pride that prompts him to prefer jail to psychiatric treatment.

It's almost impossible to like him. Although he's relatively gentlemanly for the camera and for James, whose approval he covets, Stevie is a drinking, substance-abusing brawler who fails repeatedly to control his impulses and his hostility.

The picture does not sentimentalize him, but it attempts to comprehend the jagged line of his life from abused child to child abuser, and accomplishes its goal with an astounding level of candor and insight.

It's hard to imagine a documentary penetrating a blackened soul with more understated compassion for an ongoing traffic accident of a person who lacks perspective about himself.

The underlying sadness of so wasted a life wells up when Stevie is taken to meet, a decade later, the only foster parents who had succeeded in getting through to him.

That sadness washes through the final moments as the film shows how Stevie, just by being himself, continues to subvert every attempt to help him.

Something at his core seems reachable, or was some time ago. No one knows how to help him rescue himself. We can't go back and rewrite each other's life scripts.

James seems to need to try. He quotes William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

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Movie Detials

'Stevie'

Director: Steve James.

MPAA rating: Unrated, but PG-13 in nature for adult content.

Now playing: Squirrel Hill Theater.