|
|
|
Movie Reviews
| When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Dir. and prod. by Spike Lee. 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks Production and HBO Documentary Films, 2006. 256 mins.
|
| The languid Delta rhythms of "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans" by Louis Armstrong and His Dixieland Seven ripple over a fluid montage of that city past and present, once flush, now flooded, merging newsreel clips of happier times with video of the waterlogged wreckage of what used to be a neighborhood, a home, a life. Surveyed from the air or at water level, the vista is an otherworldly, soaked-to-the-skin urban sprawl of flotsam and jetsam, a whirlpool of images punctuated by the kind of serendipitous metonymy that cannot be scripted: a street sign reading "Humanity Street" up to its neck in the swirling floodwaters. |
1
|
|
Hurricane Katrina began as a weather system and within hours of landfall morphed into a cultural bellwether, upgraded from a category 3 storm surge to a category 5 political shock wave. In HBO's When the Levees Broke, an ambitious four-hour documentary solemnly subtitled A Requiem in Four Acts, the filmmaker-activist-Knicks fan Spike Lee, the first African American director in history to carve out an enduring niche in the Hollywood entertainment matrix, performs a forensic postmortem on the once vibrant, fun-giving site of gumbo and jambalaya, Confederate dunces, and streetcars named Desire. Alas, unlike the New Orleans funeral ritual that serves as its visual and aural leitmotiv, Lee's opus is a dirge from beginning to end. Given the condition of the body politic still buried above ground, this is not a criticism. |
2
|
|
Predictably, appropriately, in tracking the storm from a red-blob computer model to the hearing rooms of the U.S. Congress, Lee's barometer is set to measure the racial, not the meteorological, atmospherics. Snubbing a "voice of God" narrator, he recruits a chorus of mortal voices, almost all those of natives of New Orleans or forced exiles (not refugees) to deliver impassioned, embittered, grief-stricken, and streetwise first-person accounts of the biblical visitation that started to rain down on August 29, 2005, and, for most, has not yet let up. A trio of historians (Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, 2006; Michael Eric Dyson, author of Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, 2006; and John M. Barry, author of Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, 1997) offer pertinent backstory, local color, and guidance through the rubble, and a few celebrities pop in for cameo appearances (Sean Penn, who came down to the city's Ninth Ward to get his feet wet; rap artist Kanye West, who blurted out on a telethon, "George Bush doesn't care about black people!"; and the inevitable Rev. Al Sharpton), but the film ebbs and flows on the inspired solo riffs of Lee's pickup band of ordinary members of the parish. The voices are not muted, not shy, and not, for the most part, white. |
3
|
|
Speaking for the thousands who sweltered in filth at the Superdome and the Convention Center or waited thirsty, hungry, and dying, out of sight in attics or stranded all too visibly on I-10, the vignettes of personal loss and psychic devastation are seldom less than heartbreaking: the wrenching keen of a woman returning to her demolished home ("God have mercy!"), the man who breaks down and sobs for his lost city, or the three generations of women returning to the family dream house in the Ninth Ward to confront a nightmare. Throughout, in commendable contrast to the current crop of documentarian camera hogs, Lee keeps well out of frame—though he cannot resist a wisecrack when a white resident of the lower Ninth Ward returns to his homestead armed with two shotguns and one 9mm handgun. "Yo," Lee breaks in from off-camera, "Were you looking for Bin Laden?" By far the best lines, however, are the ad libs from the eyewitnesses, spiked with black English vernacular. "Def heat," says Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, the most charismatic of Lee's cast of characters, describing the tropical heat that descended in the days after Katrina, "beyond African heat." |
. . . |
There are about 868 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
