NATIONAL POST (Toronto) - April 7, 2000

FILM REVIEW

A Father and Son Vindicated, but not quite Healed

By A.O. Scott

Stephen Matthews grew up in a small town in Michigan, working in his father's live bait store and dreaming of being the first member of his family to go to college. When he was still a teenager, he got his girlfriend, Danette, pregnant, and they had a son. These perfectly ordinary circumstances, which could come out of a Raymond Carver story or a Bruce Springsteen ballad, lie in the background of "The Jaundiced Eye", director Nonny de la Peña's wrenching new documentary.

Matthews soon discovered that he was gay, (divorced Danette, and moved to California to escape the drab provinciality of his hometown. The mother of his child found a new boyfriend, but Matthews parents continued to enjoy a close relationship with their grandson, who frequently spent weekends at their house.

What happened next is horrifying, but far from extraordinary. The 1980s saw a wave of shocking allegations that young children were being sexually abused in bizarre and hideous ways. The testimony of children - often coached by well-meaning but badly trained therapists and pushed by zealous prosecutors---sent a number of innocent people to jail, among them Stephen Matthews and his father, Melvin, who were convicted in 1989 of molesting Stephen's five-year-old son. After four years in jail, they were freed on appeal in 1997.

Their case is not as spectacular, or as well known, as the McMartin or Little Rascals daycare cases, hut it followed a similar pattern. Stephen's ex-girlfriend was troubled by some aspects of her son's behavior, and soon a therapist was extracting wild stories from him. He reported that he was forced to watch his father and grandfather having sex, that he had been tied to a tree and sodomized, and that his father had penetrated him with the blade of a machete. No corroborating physical evidence was ever produced, but the boy's testimony was sufficient to convict both Stephen Matthews and his father.

De la Peña takes us through the legal maze that led, a decade after the charges were first levelled, to the granting of a new trial. The trial never took place, because the district attorney's office declined to prosecute, citing insufficient evidence. Some of what the film documents is almost comical: The Matthewses first lawyer attributes his clients conviction to their refusal to hire a handwriting analyst to screen potential jurors, even though he himself seems to have mishandled crucial medical evidence. De la Peña also records the selfless decency of Walter Carlson, a local detective who made it his life's mission to exonerate the Matthewses, and whose wife carried on his crusade after he died.

Mostly, this film catalogues a dozen varieties of cruelty and heartbreak. Stephen Matthews retains a remarkable affability in the face of an ordeal that has included a rape in prison and the loss of all contact with his son. His father found religion in prison. But beneath the still waters of their friendly Midwestern reserve you can intuit deep reservoirs of rage and resentment, not least toward each other.

And though the criminal justice system can provide a measure of vindication, it can't guarantee a happy ending. In the film's devastating last scene, Stephen listens ‘to the voice of his now teenage son, whose name is never heard on the soundtrack, and what he hears is, in its way, more shocking than any of the boy's lurid courtroom testimony.

Of course, every story has two sides, and de Ia Peña is honourably fair-minded. She brings in experts from both sides of the debate about how to handle allegations of sexual abuse and allows the boy's mother, Danette. and his step-father, Doug Wilson, to defend their continued belief in the Matthewses guilt. Fairness, of course, is not the same as neutrality, but the Wilsons, whose faces are never shown, don't seem to require much prodding to create the impression that they may have been motivated by jealousy and intolerance.

De la Peña has continued the valuable work, begun by writers such as journalist Debbie Nathan and literary critic Frederick Crews, of bringing the nation back to its senses after an episode of mass hysteria. "The Jaundiced Eye" is a passionate. angry piece of advocacy, but it is equally, and in consequence, a brave and necessary act of truth- telling.