Stevie: The Movie

"`Life is like a railway station,' Stevie said: `The train of birth brings us in, the train of death will carry us away.'"

"Hmm," the man murmurs to himself, register ing what he has just said. Then he doses the book with a small thump and introduces the film itself, as if lifting a curtain: "All aboard for a trip to the suburbs!"

Trevor Howard's prologue speech is followed by the unmistakable blast of a moving train. We're hurled into the present tense. For one moment, one long shot, it's as if we're at the front window of that train, looking ahead, as if in a daydream, approaching a dark tunnel. Sitting in a darkened movie theater among strangers, entering another world to the rhythm of a moving train. There's the dose-up of a train passing-we're both inside and outside that train, looking on. We've been thrust into modern-day London, preparing to meet Stevie herself riding home on her daily commute. The camera pulls back so that we can see her wearing a yellow winter coat and reading a book. We encounter her in the present tense-a middle-aged woman putting away her book, gathering her things and heading for the door while the long red train pulls into the station.

It's a gray winter day, a chill nip in the air. This will be the gloomy weather-the stark backdrop-- for the entire film. While the music comes up and the white-lettered credits flash onto the screen, we track Smith marching home from the Southgate Station down the well-trod lanes of a woodsy suburban park. There's an iron-gray lake in the background, ducks floating on a misty pond. She comes out of the park, turns down a street we now recognize, and comes to the familiar white-trimmed redbrick house. We've entered in mid-stream. But, in a sense, the whole film operates in the space between its two opening frames. The director offers us a portrait cast in time. It has the retrospective glow-the mournful aural-of death, but it also has the jubilant texture of a life-a sensibilityrescued from oblivion and held up to the light.

3. "A House of Mercy"

I'm conscious of the fact that I was at full import from the very beginning of this film because I was already steeped-hell, I was soaked-in Stevie Smith's work. It's a different-and perhaps lesser -film for those who are coming to Smith's work for the first time, who are unaware of its deadly innocence, its zany humor and torrential pain. It's an appealing but more introductory work for those who couldn't use it, as I did, to blood the work and gasp back into the poems. It takes its time to build its rhythms, accrue its meanings. But I was, in a very real way already predisposed, already prepared, to over-read Stevie, my strategy here, my guilty pleasure. My foot was on the pedal. My immediate and deeply emotional response to the film was predicated upon my relationship to its subject. It may even be at times incommensurate with the film's cinematic achievement, its status as a free-standing and wholly realized work of art in its own right, though not, I believe, with Smith's own work, her quirky hymns to death, her lived poetry. Yet I also trust the way the film insinuates itself-and propels Stevie-into the affective lives of its viewers.