Film Analysis | Film Reviews

Behind the Numbers

1 Oct , 1999  

Written by Julie Wolf | Posted by:

A review of 'Where is Stephanie?'

A government report released in April said the teen birth rate dropped to a record low in 1997, 6% lower than its all-time high in 1994. Of the 50 states, Vermont could boast the lowest numbers of teen births.

Filmmakers Bess O’Brien and Mary Arbuckle go well beyond the statistics in their harrowing documentary "Where Is Stephanie?" When Mount Holyoke College (O’Brien’s alma mater) screened it last October, a campus publication said the film "focuses on adolescents at risk in northern Vermont." I disagree. The film is not about adolescents at risk; it is about one family at risk, in danger of never getting out from under the specter of a brutal murder that took them and their town unawares.

In 1994, 17-year-old Stephanie Sady gave birth to her son, Patrick, in Granville, Vermont. An unwed high school senior, Stephanie unwittingly went from being one statistic to another when she was brutally murdered and raped by a man she knew, making hers the first murder in Granville in 32 years.

While the filmmakers present Stephanie as more than a percentage point, this isn’t their primary achievement. Without the help of a professional narrator, voice modulated for maximum dramatic effect, and without trotting out experts on teen pregnancy, the filmmakers achieve a greater success: they document death’s impact on life.

The potency of the grief in the hour-long documentary never subsides. In fact, a caption halfway through the film that says "Two Years Later" is about the only indication that time has passed at all. Mourning takes on the dimensions of an immovable object. In the first half hour, the burden of detailing the actual murder falls largely to Stephanie’s mother, Gloria Davis, a woman who looks simultaneously powerful and defeated. Interviewed shortly after the murder, she repeats the lurid details of Stephanie’s last hours with familiarity and contempt, almost in a monotone, seemingly able to accept (using the term loosely) everything except that the murderer continued to batter her daughter after she died.

Interestingly, we get nothing of Gloria’s background:.not just her past–for instance, was Gloria herself an unwed teen mother (another statistic)? and did she ever marry?–but her present. There is very little of her outside the home. We see her briefly at work (she sells tires), and at one point a Century 21 "For Sale" sign is visible on her lawn. The scope of the film seems intentionally small, making the loss that much more palpable. Gloria’s life is consumed by her elder daughter’s death.

As is her younger daughter’s. Once April Sady enters the picture, the film becomes even more heartbreaking, if that’s possible. April says Stephanie was her best friend and role model. Two years after the murder, April follows her sister’s lead, getting pregnant a few months before high school graduation. But she was also jealous of Stephanie, the better liked of the sisters, according to April.. Even after Stephanie’s death, she feels neglected in favor of her nephew, Stephanie’s son, who is being raised by Gloria.

Words don’t do April justice. She measures her life in terms of what Stephanie had done while she lived, and what she hadn’t been able to do because she died. "I went to the prom because she didn’t get to go," five-months-pregnant April says, "and it sucked." When April turns 18, she cries at her birthday party (complete with male stripper), because, Gloria says, she feels guilty about getting older than Stephanie. It’s not just that, though: April is embarrassed by the stripper, something Stephanie never would have been, according to Gloria. And Stephanie wanted three strippers at her party.

Death does interesting things to relationships. In Stephanie’s case, death stabilizes hers with her mother. At 13, Stephanie had left her mother’s home in Rutland to live with her father; over the years, she was said to pit one parent against the other. But with April, death seems to jeopardize the relationship, deepening a rivalry that April claims to have always felt, and forcing the younger sister to become the older one.

Likewise, film does interesting things to death. Stephanie is forever 17, not just in memory but on video shot by a relative and used to chilling effect by the filmmakers. Along with this personal footage, there’s also footage from the local news. Stephanie’s disappearance and death, naturally, led the news. We see stories like this every day: a young mother disappears; her mother/sister/boyfriend provides sound bites; days/months/later, the reporter originally assigned to the story stands in front of the county courthouse and tells us, in a voice modulated for maximum dramatic effect, that the girl is dead, her murderer in custody. The story over, Stephanie becomes yesterday’s news.

Stephanie’s murder is not an unsolved crime; her murderer confessed upon his arrest. Her family has what so many victims’ families say they want: closure. Closure to the mystery of her death, perhaps, but there is no closure to their grief. "People who have not experienced a loss," says Gloria, "put a time limit on grief."

‘Where Is Stephanie?’, this year’s winner for Best Independent Video Award in the 1999 New England Film & Video Festival, screens at the Museum of Fine Arts Saturday, October 23, at 1:30 p.m. For more information, please call (617) 369-3300.


'Where Is Stephanie?', this year's winner for Best Independent Video Award in the 1999 New England Film & Video Festival, screens at the Museum of Fine Arts Saturday, October 23, at 1:30 p.m. For more information, please call (617) 369-3300.

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