WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE:
A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS
HBO
Not Rated
THE VERDICT:
While occasionally pretentious and overly emphatic, Spike Lee’s in-depth look at the
devastation and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is a moving documentary that should not be missed.
3 stars
Survivors have said when the winds hit New Orleans the sound was like “having a freight train in your ear for hours on end.” And that was just the beginning of the fury unleashed by Hurricane Katrina when the Category 3 storm hit land a year ago in Louisiana and Mississippi. It was the aftermath that made the storm the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.
“When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” a new four-hour HBO documentary from director Spike Lee, focuses on what happened once the storm had passed and New Orleans flooded. It’s an uncompromising look at a place and people dealing with obstacle after hellish obstacle, from rising water levels to loss of homes to lack of government support.
Lee gets his information from the people who lived through the events. Much of the documentary is comprised of one-on-one, cut away-free interviews between the director and average city residents, involved politicians like New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and more famous faces like Sean Penn and Al Sharpton.
City radio reporter Garland Robinette, for example, breaks down in tears as he defends the much-criticized actions of outspoken Nagin, saying that relief only came to New Orleans after Nagin went on air and pleaded for federal support.
“How do I feel about a million-plus people being just thrown out of the place they’ve lived their whole lives?” Robinette asks. “That’s indescribable. I don’t have words for that. I never thought I’d live in a place where that could happen … We are destroyed.”
The interviews and the stories told have a harrowing level of specificity. One young man was riddled with buckshot by a storeowner who mistakenly thought he was a looter.
The mother of a drowned child refused to hold the funeral in New Orleans because she blames the city for her daughter’s death. Perhaps most gruesome of all, one man recounts how his mother died waiting for an evacuation bus at the city’s Convention Center and how he was forced to abandon her body, covered in only a rain poncho and his quickly-scrawled contact information, when help finally arrived.
An incredible amount of footage has been skillfully edited into the final film, and the images on display are powerful. Cars crushed under homes. Bodies floating inches away from fences and front doors. Spray-painted graffiti on home after home, with messages of despair and hopelessness like “Destroy this memory” and the words “Thanks Katrina” above a crudely drawn broken heart.
Sometimes Lee’s presentation is too heavy-handed. The title “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” is more pretentious than it needs to be, as are opening credits proclaiming the documentary “a film document” designed to help deposed New Orleans citizens “rebuild, revive and renew in these United States of America.” He also throws in one too many overtly metaphoric images, such as wind and rain ripping a US flag to shreds.
The four-hour running time allows for multiple digressions, perhaps too many, on everything from a possible conspiracy involving intentional dynamiting of the levees to how the Canadian Mounted Police arrived at the scene of the disaster before President Bush. Yet despite the film’s length, Lee mentions the comparable devastation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast only in passing, instead choosing to focus on the more highly-publicized destruction of New Orleans.
“Levees” takes an expansive view of Katrina’s toll on New Orleans, but it filters discussions of city history through an almost entirely black perspective.
This makes sense. Most of the city’s culture is intrinsically linked to the black experience, and most of the people who lost their homes after the flooding were poor blacks.
Most of Lee’s film broaches racial issues in even-handed ways. The reporting dips into bias and risks offense, however, when Lee flirts with near-canonization of Kanye West and laces an opening montage with nothing but negative images of whites, from segregationist picketing to police brutality.
But Lee has never been a cautious filmmaker, nor would one really want him to be. He shoots from his heart and the truths of his own perspective, and his integrity of vision permeates every frame of “Levees” whether you agree with his ideas or not.
One of the film’s more respectable qualities is its lack of optimistic resolution. People want to return to their homes, but, as one resident puts it, “there’s nothing to help them survive here.”
Lee paints a comprehensive and less than rosy portrait of the challenges facing New Orleans, ranging from skyrocketing crime rates to depleted school systems to global warming.
Overwhelming in both its length and emotional content, “Levees” celebrates that shaken but ultimately unbreakable need to rebuild what’s been lost in all our lives. The film argues convincingly that an early step in healing is facing the ugly past head-on and stepping away from it bruised but wiser.
“The city’s gonna live,” says one resident. “It’s got a heartbeat.”
Levees4 caption: Courtesy photo
Controversial director Spike Lee’s portrait of a Katrina-stricken New Orleans is decidedly poignant as well as pessimistic. The documentary airs on HBO on tonight at 10:45 p.m.
Levees3 caption: Courtesy photo
One of the many scenes of destruction portrayed in Spike Lee’s four-part series.