A touchstone in the field of documentary filmmaking, setting an untoppable standard for personal involvement on the part of a filmmaker. In 1982, while a student at Southern Illinois, the future director of Hoop Dreams, Steve James, signed up to be the Big Brother of a troubled eleven-year-old in rural Pomona, Stephen "Stevie" Fielding, the illegitimate offspring of an alcoholic and brutal mother, handed over first to his stepgrandmother (living right next door), and then passed through a series of foster homes, in which somewhere along the line he was sexually abused: "He always seemed to be an accident waiting to happen." In 1995, guilt-ridden at having lost touch with Stevie, James sought him out again and brought along a camera crew, finding a childishly sulky adult who had come through a violent marriage and compiled an impressive rap sheet of petty crimes. The "waiting," in a sense, was over, but the worst was still to come. After a two-year hiatus — time off to shoot the low-budget biopic, Prefontaine — James discovers that in the interim Stevie has been charged with molesting an eight-year-old cousin. No genius of fictional construction could have come up with a more potent mix. James's wife happens to be a counselor for sex offenders. They have children of their own. And James himself is thrust in front of the camera as a major character, a member of the family, together with the recalcitrant Stevie ("I don't need no damn therapy"); the latter's reformed and churchified mother, toward whom Stevie maintains what once might have been called a love-hate relationship, emphasis on hate; his enfeebled stepgrandmother, who remains bitterly at war with the mother; his married but childless stepsister ("Some people have kids and throw 'em in trash cans, and here I want a child and can't have one"), who miraculously becomes pregnant in the course of filming; and Stevie's slightly handicapped fiancée, whose uncensored facial expressiveness more than makes up for any verbal deficiencies. Between them, what a world of woe! With James as our point of identification, if not life raft, the film draws us ineluctably into its web, where we can't simply dismiss Stevie (as we so easily could, in the handy stereotypes of Poor White Trash, Inbred Hillbilly, Redneck Geek, and the like, if we had seen only his arraignment on the nightly news) and can't extricate ourselves from the awful futility of the situation. As much as the film is a spectacle of bad teeth, bad hair, bad grammar, bad prospects, it is also a spectacle of the existential heroism of those who go on trying to help someone who is miles past helping. And although the DV image, too, is bad, the badness is thoroughly offset by the alertness of the camerawork. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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