This morning Jaimee and I watched Stevie, a slice-of-horror documentary that makes Capturing the Friedmans [blogged] look tame. The filmmaker, Steve James, briefly volunteered to be a Big Brother to Stevie when he was in college ten years ago. After graduating, James completely lost contact with Stevie until he reestablished contact in the hope of filming a feel-good documentary about it.

James was unprepared for what he would find. In addition to the usual deprivations of extreme rural poverty, Stevie's childhood abandonment at the hands of every authority figure in his life (including, notably, the filmmaker himself) has turned him into a selfish, violent sociopath. When he first makes contact with Stevie as an adult, the meeting spooks James badly enough that he doesn't contact Stevie again for two years. When he returns, Stevie is in jail, accused of molesting his eight-year-old cousin.

Stevie is a tragic portrait both of his family's and community's failure to make Stevie into a stable adult, as well as a frightening portrait of the sad result. It's hard to watch, but it's good. And, like Capturing the Friedmans, it raises important issues about an filmmaker's responsibility towards his or her subject. This movie is deeply exploitative in a number of important and discomfitting ways, not least among them: Why is this movie being made at all? What give James to right to use the suffering of Stevie and his family for his own benefit?

Netflix