FILM REVIEW

Harrowing True Tale of Injustice

BY GEOFF PEVERE - MOVIE CRITIC

The Jaundiced Eye

Another riveting miscarriage-of-justice documentary from the producer Dan Gifford of the pot-stirring "Waco: The Rules of Engagement", Nonny de Ia Peña's "The Jaundiced Eye" is an unsettling portrait of lives poisoned by prejudice. hated and close-minded ignorance.

In 1989, Stephen Matthews, a recently uncloseted gay man from small-town Michigan, whose 5 year-old son lived with his estranged wife, was sent to jail with his father on charges the two men (along with Stephen's mother), repeatedly subjected the boy to grotesque acts of sexual abuse. The boy, under profoundly dubious questioning from local police and children's welfare officials, claimed to have been sodomized more than 40 times by the men and to have been penetrated by a machete.

Despite the fact there was no physical evidence to support the claims, Matthews and his father were sent to jail: Stephen was raped there, while his father became a born-again Christian bodybuilder. Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction.

While the cases were eventually dropped on appeal (for "insufficient evidence"), it was not until nearly a decade following the first charges, when sufficient damage had been done in everyone's lives to ensure that no one would emerge deeply and permanently unscarred.

An unabashedly angry and partisan affair, The Jaundiced Eye works like the best investigative TV journalism, but without the bogus corporate pretense to balance objectivity. Which is to say that it works you up and leaves you that way, presumably in the interest of helpIng to prevent outrages like this from happening again. Would that it could.