Steve, part 2.

The staff at Steve’s school, called ‘Last Chance’ in the book, are like islands in the stream, standing in a tumultuous torrent of pain and anger trying stop it tearing the young men in their care away downstream,  towards disaster.  Steve and his colleagues know they have to do all they can to hold them, emotionally, heartfully, courageously (heartfulness and courage are really the same thing) to offer them a place of physical and emotional safety in what may be the only place where they are accepted as they are, for whom they are,  despite their behaviour.    

In youth work and schools we kept saying that ‘if there is something wrong with a child or young person’s behaviour there is almost certainty something wrong with their situation.’       Their behaviour is symptomatic, not causal.   We needed to look beyond the behaviour and explore what was behind it.   Why, for instance, is the bully bullying? The liar lying?  And we learnt that those who have been abused, in whatever way, are not likely to present themselves in ways that arouse our sympathy.  

That is why we needed to set aside our expectations of ‘good behaviour’, of politeness, even decency, and to reach out across the void and offer a hand,  even when we expected it to be bitten.   Even when it had been bitten.  Being bitten hurts and these young people knew exactly how to hurt.   Their emotional (and too often physical) scars told their own story.      

But even this is not enough.   Such children and youths also need firm boundaries  consistently maintained by those who care for them.   This is the same discipline all children need of course, but for them it is in spades.   The young boys in Steve need to know that this really is their last chance, that outside the boundaries is a void.  Both Steve the character and Steve the movie are clear about this.   

But how can the Staff  doing work like this be so strong, so consistent, so alert and responsive  when  they are also standing on rocky ground, also in danger of being swept away  by the torrent?   The film is set in 1996, after 18 years of Tory Government,  but now Britain has emerged from another 15 years of their rule, another 15 years of underinvestment in education and youth work. 

I remember attending a national conference  called by the Tories in the mid 1990’s, when they wanted youth work to be ‘contracted out’ from Local Government to charities such as the uniformed organisations, the denominational Churches and the YMCA and YWCA.    But they needed us to tell them what measurable ‘outcomes’ we would produce to justify the work – and the expense.    These needed it to be quantifiable, so we could be accountable.   

Many of us did not know whether to laugh or cry, or both.    For most of us the only justification for our work was the potential benefit it might bring to those we worked with, and these benefits could not be measured, predicted, tracked or tested.  Many of them  might not emerge for years, long after they had left our clubs or organisations.     Some young people might not benefit at all from our efforts.   Some would certainly have been damaged, but none-the-less we were there to ‘cast our bread on the waters’ in hope.     We did the work simply for the sake of the young people. 

The situation we see in Steve shows what happens when work with children and young people is shaped by a governmental ethic of profit and loss.    Not by ‘what can we give?’ but by ‘what shall we gain?’    In our case the Minister suggested that our efforts might mean more young staying on in education, or going into work.   These things, they were sure, would improve the Nation’s economy.    Now, of course, most English schools are run by Academies, by businesses.   The work done in places like Steve’s school is not really economically viable.       

If this does not read like a movie review forgive me.   It is a review of the truths that this movie tells.     If you read The Guardian article linked to it you will see that Steve  was made by people who know what they are talking about, and who care about it passionately.  That is why it is a passionate movie - and yes, I say again that movies can be made to move us, and as the great critic Roger Ebert said, “to generate empathy”.    I was going to write about the Direction, the Music, Cinematography and of course the Actors, but you can find out all about these elsewhere.     This article is simply about what their combined efforts meant to me as someone who spent most of their working life in Youth Work and Child Protection.   That is why this film means a lot to me.   

 

Steve. A film about heroism.

  

Steve is Ciaran Murphy’s new film.   He stars in it and produced it, working with Max Porter as they adapted Porter’s novel Shy into this screenplay.  Murphy had already worked with Porter in the stage version of the novel Grief Is The Thing With Feathers,  and the short film All Of This Unreal Time.    Adapting the two novels  required considerable work, as they both used interior monologue, chaotic nonlinear time scales and in the case of Grief, poetry.  Shy also mixed in the jumbled memories of previous conversations and confrontations.    Shy is played by Jay Lycurgo, who previously worked with Ciaren Murphy on Peaky Blinders,  and consecutively follows the events of just 24 hours.

Steve moves the focus away from the initial narrator, Shy, a 16 year old boy living in a corrective school trying to cope with behaviour that other schools could not manage.   It is 1996.  Shy is a central character, but most of the time we follow Steve, the Head teacher.    

Why is Shy there? We are told that “He’s sprayed, snorted, smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a shop, trashed a house, broken a nose, stabbed his stepdad’s finger.”  Already expelled from two schools, his first caution came when he was thirteen, and this may be his last chance, as it is for other boy there.   Shy is depressed and confused.  His mother also suffers from depression and, it seems, can no longer cope with Shy in her life.  This is a desperate time for Shy. 

But Steve and his exhausted under-resourced staff are having a hard time coping too.    An intrusive film crew arrives, totally insensitive to the febrile atmosphere, the knife edge that too many relationships negotiate, or fail to negotiate.   Verbal and physical violence can break out at any time, with fearful possible consequences.     An MP arrives trying to engage in conversation with the boys, and win their support in the upcoming General Election – and have it filmed for propaganda.  Needless to say this does not go well. In the midst of this Steve seems to be suffering from PTSD after a car crash and resorts to pain killers and alcohol.    

This is not an easy film to watch, and it should not be easy.  There is so much pain, anger, sadness, despair, fear and confusion, but there are also moments of joy, hope and emotional intelligence, shown by both members of staff and the boys.    I remember Hemingway’s definition of courage as ‘grace under pressure’.    That rings true to me, and so did this film.    

In 1996, when this film is set,  I was doing group work in an establishment one rung lower down, in the place young men ended up when all other systems failed; a prison for ‘Serious Young Offenders’, seventeen and eighteen years old, many of them there because their uncontrolled violence had led them to commit GBH, manslaughter or murder.   I worked with some of them, with some Warders, and the Prison Chaplian.    And I was over whelmed by admiration for so many of them.     Not all Warders are brutes, many of them will do whatever they can to help their charges to be rehabilitated, to find hope and purpose in their lives.  And many of those young men were determined to do so themselves.   

I also came to see that the difference between many of those boys and myself came down to sheer luck.  In so many of their lives there came a time, maybe just 10 minutes,  when they could no longer cope with the pressures life had brought down on their shoulders.   The weight of their pain, anger, confusion and despair leading them to acts of hate and violence.   Acts they would regret for the rest of their lives.     I am sure that many other people are put under  such pressures, I know I one was, but we got through those 10 minutes – or however long they last – not by virtue or moral strength but by luck and  having previously been given the support we needed to survive.   Given, not deserved.  We all deserve it, but not everyone is given it.     

The boys and staff  portrayed in Steve are heroic.    I will write more, later, about the performances,  direction, music, camera work and script, but for now it is enough to say that this is a fine film, a grown up film, a Good Thing, a ray of light in the darkness and a beacon of hope in hard times.    It is not fun.  At times it is properly frightening.    It does not have a happy ending, in fact it does not really have an ending at all.  The 24 hours are simply over.  Another 24 hours will follow.   Things will not necessarily get better; in fact they will almost certainly get worse,  but for now we have come through and there is hope.

Why hope?  Because this is a film about love.   Not sentimental love, which is cheap, but about love-in-action, the love we call compassion, and that is always costly.     I urge you to see it.   We need more films like this.  We need more works of art like this.  We need more real life examples of the loving endurance portrayed in this movie.    My thanks to all involved.