Trouble the Water

TROUBLE THE WATER          A-          

USA  (90 mi)  2008  d:  Carl Deal and Tina Lessin

It felt like we lost our citizenship.  —Kimberly Roberts

A wonderfully unpretentious film that by tracing the path of one family gets to the heart of the matter of the government’s notorious absence in New Orleans after Katrina leaving residents, but mostly poor and black residents where the greatest damage occurred, to fend for themselves.  Without explaining how she happened upon a video camera, apparently a $20 camcorder that feels left over from the CLOVERFIELD (2008) movie set, Kimberly Roberts from her home on France Street in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans starts filming her house and everything around the neighborhood in anticipation of Hurricane Katrina, as she wanted a recording of what it looked like both before and after.  Greeting everyone she meets on the street, asking what their plans are, also filming while riding her bike, where you can hear the click click click as the pedal hits the kickstand, we get a good sense of how she sees her neighborhood and the people familiar to her living in it, some of whom, including several in her own family, will not survive the storm.  She has a natural ease with people and the good sense to narrate while the camera is running explaining what we are looking at as she stocks up on food, ice and emergency provisions.  Unable to afford “the luxury” to get safely out of town (apparently their car had recently been stolen), she and her husband Scott decide to ride out the storm from her home, producing about twenty minutes of some of the most intense footage of the storm in action, where after the levees break a mere three blocks away, she comments “It’s like an ocean out there” as the water rises and her street is flooded as high as a stop sign.  Her family is forced into the attic and eventually move to a house across the street that is one story higher, where she and about a dozen others including children, elderly and an infirmed have to be carried over a river chest high by her husband who uses a punching bag as a flotation device.  With no help in sight and a 911 operator that tells them the city is not prepared to offer them any rescue assistance at this time, they have to wander through this nightmarish deluge on their own.

 

As we piece together footage after her battery runs dead where the film is framed with time headings—Two days after the levees fail, or one week after the levees fail, we learn that despite an abandoned Navy barracks several blocks away that had already been closed due to cuts in federal funding, where only a skeleton crew remained protecting the base, this family was turned away from more than 200 empty beds at the point of M-16’s locked and loaded pointed directly at them, ordering them to disperse.  Instead they spent several nights in an abandoned school before they found a boat to take them to a Red Cross shelter, which is where they met the documentary filmmakers who were originally attempting to do a story on the travails of the National Guard, over-extended both in Iraq and now back here at home, but the Guard refused to cooperate.  Among the most devastating footage captured was the deadly aftermath where in a rented van filled to capacity with 25 of her neighbors they drive past the New Orleans Superdome, where a long tracking shot resembles the look of the Civil War wounded in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939), capturing defenseless, helpless people who have no way out, many lying on the ground sick or near death from lack of water while several buses remain idle parked right across the street.  While this entire catastrophe is amateurishly documented, Roberts has an amazing ability to offer her own soulful perspective whose raw insight and authenticity adds to the harrowing realism of the moment.     

Actual news footage shown on TV is interspersed with what Roberts sees on the ground, oftentimes at complete odds with one another, especially when President Bush or FEMA director Mike Brown affirm their alleged successes, or when we get a good look at the tourist video that the city still proudly uses.  The Roberts family exits the city for their first time for a home 200 miles away owned by an uncle which has no running water, where in a typical day in the life scenario, the water department comes out to turn the water on at one point, only to return minutes later to turn it back off again.  That uncle lost his mother when she was abandoned in a hospital during Katrina, as the entire staff evacuated and left the patients behind to fend for themselves.  From this location they can visit FEMA centers where they line up next to “Gate B – Cattle entrance” and reapply for emergency funds that never came, after which they hope to move to a safer location, believing everything has been lost at home.  When they make a return visit several weeks later to obtain what they can, the streets are a sea of mud and obliteration patrolled by neglected, near starving stray dogs.  Kimberly feels blessed that a photo of her mother remains intact, explaining her mother died of AIDS when she was 13 and this is her only surviving keepsake.  Amazingly their two dogs left behind survived, though they have been living on highly contaminated water, while the corpse of one man seen in the before-Katrina footage still lays dead in his living room.  The National Guard is summoned to obtain the body.  Again a long tracking shot of several city blocks both a few weeks after the flood and shown again a year later shows one or two houses either rebuilt or still standing on her block while everything else remains a wasteland of utter demolition.  Nothing has changed as there is simply no sign of life left there at all. 

Instead they set out for Memphis, Tennessee where another relative lives, bringing extended family and the dogs, where in a nice, clean neighborhood it’s clear the additional burden is asking a lot of anyone.  At first, the peace and quiet and relative safety is like an oasis after the storm, but after a period of time, having nowhere else to go, they eventually return to New Orleans where Scott gets a job working with a building contractor reconstructing houses.  Kimberly has a budding rap career under the name Black Kold Madina which is on full display after she discovers her own rap demo previously believed lost when she provides an audacious, foot stomping performance of her song (I Don't Need You To Tell Me That I'm) “ Amazing,” Black Kold Madina - "Amazing" YouTube (3:54), while standing outside an overstuffed closet in a crowded bedroom with her husband proudly watching which is in perfect synch, a song that offers plenty of insight into her personal history, including that knife scar across her husband’s jaw, their life before Katrina as drug hustlers, and her literal resurrection into a woman with a clean slate and a new attitude about her future.  It’s not so much a song as an anthem of joy and triumph in the face of diversity.  There’s a defiant “Won’t Get Fooled Again” mentality that Kimberly develops after she’s had a chance to see schools outside New Orleans actually prepare kids for college and the future, while with the highest incarceration rate in the nation New Orleans is instead “preparing us for prison."  Kimberly Roberts has come full circle with her before and after footage.  Little did she know that what she couldn’t film, the growing maturity inside of herself, is what ended up changing the most.  This disaster movie which is filled with first hand observations from an every day black perspective turns into a film of personal triumph, and in a moment of rare humility, Kimberly is brought to tears when one neighbor actually thanks her for the efforts she made on behalf of all her neighbors.

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts

WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE:  A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS 

– made for TV               A-             
USA  (255 mi in Two Parts)  2005  d:  Spike Lee      HBO: When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts

Easily the definitive Katrina film, as Lee has assembled massive documentation of epic proportions, mostly from the survivors, but it’s a story that still lingers even years afterwards, as the aftermath is at least as disturbing, if not more so, than the storm itself and the initial absence of any governmental intervention.  Astoundingly, despite all the public outrage about the government abandoning the poorest and most helpless citizens stuck for days in stifling heat, many lined up outside the Superdome with no food, water, electricity, or toilet facilities waiting for buses that never came, some retreated to their rooftops, some were left dead on the street for days, many in hospitals or senior facilities were abandoned and all but left for dead as well, where there were continued accusations of racial divisiveness that suggested the overprivileged and upper class Bush simply didn’t care about poor blacks, as evidenced by inappropriate comments made by his own mother (Barbara Bush Calls Evacuees Better Off - New York Times).  New Orleans remains a center of controversy because they still haven’t got it right.  Despite the passage of months and years, it’s a shame how little has changed and how difficult it has been for anyone to get the help they need to return and rebuild their lives.  Instead, many families still remain scattered all over the United States, never told initially where they were going as they were bused and then flown out of town, and all too often, as in slavery days, knowingly separated from their own family in the process.  The event itself plays out like a black Holocaust, where blacks were forced to endure the worst suffering imaginable, not only losing their homes and family members to the hurricane and the floods, where searing images of nightmarish fear and death remain, some at gunpoint from their own police and National Guard units, being called refugees by the news media, as if they no longer had a country, abandoned by all phases of government relief, basically left to fend for themselves while the politicians squabbled about whose responsibility it was to do anything, a sure indicator that little or nothing would be done.  After facing the initial wave of governmental neglect, they were forced to endure another wave of insurance company neglect, where the business response was to nitpick about whether it was water, wind, or flood damage, all in a blatant attempt to minimize their payouts, victim by victim, hardly an example of civic responsibility or concern.  The picture painted here is that the collective response to the near ruination of a major U.S. City, 80 % of which was under flood water, perhaps the worst natural disaster in American history, certainly the most expensive to repair, is that each individual had to fend for themselves, a shameful and cowardly response that still leaves huge patches of a city in ruin where much of it continues to resemble an uninhabitable bombed out war zone.

While the length of the film allows closer examination of political ramifications, where all the main participants are heard, it curiously lacks the personal focus that was so prevalent in Trouble the Water (2008), a film narrated by a Lower 9th Ward survivor, Kimberly Roberts, whose home footage takes us through the heart of the storm as well as her own family’s personal travails, some of whom did not survive, where she eloquently offers her own no-nonsense reaction to the government’s bureaucratic roadblocks.  That film also adheres to a closer timeline of the events, labeling the chronological sequences —two days after the levees fail, or one week after the levees fail, which helps the viewers stay focused on the immediate aftermath of the hurricane.  Lee’s film, on the other hand, is a blistering portrait of moral outrage extended over time, offering a greater variety of graphic images while using a chorus of voices to offer their comments about a variety of subjects, from the all but ignored Army Corps of Engineer reports both before and after Katrina, to the political fingerpointing where residents, community activists, historians, public officials, Mayor Ray Nagin, several State representatives, Governor Kathleen Blanco and the Bush administration officials are often at odds with one another, where Nagin indicates after surviving the first days of the storm that he was waiting for the cavalry to arrive, which of course, never happened, to outraged citizens, where especially poignant is the pissed off voice of Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, a local resident who just grows more and more tired of all the namby pamby bureaucratic nonsense that simply continues to find ever more ridiculous ways to avoid helping people.  The entire landscape is punctuated by New Orleans music and culture, including archival footage which is interspersed throughout, much of it due to local musicians from Donald Harrison or the marching second line Hot 8 Brass Band to Terrence Blanchard (Lee’s musical composer), who brings his elderly mother back to their destroyed family home, and a righteously indignant Wynton Marsalis who sings a captivating a cappella version of “St. James Infirmary.” (heard here years later with his own band, St. James Infirmary - Wynton Marsalis Tentet with ... - YouTube, 3:55)

While much has been told about the governmental failure to respond during this crisis, this film takes a good look not only at how difficult it has been to receive adequate compensation for their loss, but also how difficult it continues to be for those who wish to return to their homes, if only to rebuild where their now demolished house used to be, pointing out how certain business and political interests have rushed in to take advantage of the disadvantaged, buying up large portions of what appears to be unused land through the use of eminent domain, all but preventing some from ever returning.  Since anything resembling what used to be the Lower 9th Ward was wiped off the face of the earth, so too have the jobs disappeared.  When a sympathetic lawyer sent out several thousand already completed forms requiring only their signature indicating they are willing to be part of a group lawsuit, a form that is mandatory if they wish to sue the government for inadequate redress for their losses, he was stunned to discover how many responses he received by people who informed him of their illiteracy, as they could not read the form.  Even before Katrina, Louisiana had one of the poorest educational systems in America, leaving many ill-prepared to join a changing workforce.  For far too long, the rickety shacks that people were living in and the bare means subsistence levels that they were used to was not only poor, but third world poor, and for all too many, the punishment for being poor appears neverending, as the odds remain stacked against them, with the rules and continuing layers of bureaucracy continually changing, making it near impossible for anyone but the wealthy to succeed.  Lee keys into this particular mindset, offering what appears to be psychological insight unique to this disaster, where many survivors face traumatic reactions resembling damaged war veterans, suffering from post-Katrina depression and Post Traumatic Stress symptoms. 

Much of the testimony is heartbreaking and tearful, as are the pictures of the ravaged neighborhoods, where barely a house or a tree are left standing.  Even for those few who choose to rebuild, where are their neighbors if the neighborhood remains demolished?  Where are the churches, the grocery stores, the businesses?  Since all are left to recover individually, or on their own, there is no governmental or collective effort to reach out to help rebuild the lost communities that have disappeared.  If they were renters, as were about half, they are simply out of luck, while if they were homeowners, the other half, what chance do they have to succeed when not only their homes, but entire neighborhoods have been destroyed?  Blacks have a right to be suspicious, as Lee even advances the possibility that the levees were intentionally blown up to flood the poorer regions in order to save the richer territory, as this was the historical strategy used in the 1927 flood (Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) at a time when the affected neighborhoods (St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes) were nearly all white.  At the very least, there are many who believe this same mentality exists today, which explains why the business sector has such a scavenger land grab mindset to immediately rebuild the Lower 9th Ward in a new image, one much more prosperous than what existed before, and much less black.  Blacks, on the other hand, believe they are fighting for their lives and the right to maintain the diversity of their culture, which, after all, is what makes New Orleans such a thriving city in the first place.  Despite the power of the subject, and the historical relevance of documenting such a mindboggling disaster, the film is a sprawling work that has a tendency to cover the same territory, as Lee wants no voice to be left behind, which may be admirable, but it’s not as taut or well assembled as his earlier documentary 4 LITTLE GIRLS (1997), which still remains one of Lee’s best films. 

Post note:  Lee has also filmed a 5th Act a year later, which is a follow up with many of the same talking heads that spoke in his earlier film, which perhaps adds a greater sense of the futility felt by so many of the excluded black residents, as over time, what were originally only conspiracy theories about keeping poor blacks out of the rebuilding process have only become more evident.