JEK
Senior Insider
Remember Katrina? Spike Lee does.
'WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE'
Nearly a year after Katrina hit, Spike Lee's latest asks tough questions and lets the victims describe their incalculable heartbreak for themselves
- David Wiegand, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, August 21, 2006
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts: Documentary. Directed by Spike Lee. Acts 1 and 2, 9 p.m. tonight; Acts 3 and 4, Tuesday, with repeated broadcasts through Sept. 13, HBO.
Next week, the media will find its collective way back to New Orleans to mark the first anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina hit the Crescent City with historic and singular force. Inevitably, the news accounts will focus on how much is still undone, how many displaced people are still living in Texas, Utah and Oklahoma, how many lives were lost, how many others broken. Inevitably, the reports will ask the question: Will New Orleans ever find its way home again?
Spike Lee's four-hour "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" is a documentary about multiple tragedies. The film asks many questions, implies answers for the easier ones, but ultimately concludes that some are simply beyond answering. Those are the questions posed in stories of incalculable human heartbreak:
A college student comes back to the city to look for his mother and is told by officials that no bodies were found in the house he shared with her. He is relieved, until he goes to the house and finds it completely locked up, indicating that no one had ever gone inside to check. If they had, they would have found his mother's body, beneath the toppled refrigerator.
Months after the hurricane has passed, a woman separated from her family sees a news report that a young girl's body has been found in some rubble. The child is wearing a backpack. The woman's 5-year-old daughter, Serena, never went anywhere without her backpack. Later, an impossibly small white coffin is lowered into a grave and the mother's keening dies away as she walks slowly across the cemetery grass.
An elderly man whose wife is wheelchair-bound somehow manages to drag her to the roof of their home as the floodwaters rise. He holds on to her as long as he can but finally, he can only watch as she disappears in the water.
These are the tragedies you expect to tear you apart, and they do. But you may also find yourself equally affected by the other tragedies at the heart of the film. So much of what happened could have been avoided by a series of "if onlys": if only the governments -- federal, state and local -- had done even minimal planning for evacuating the city, if only the study of how a Category 3 hurricane would affect New Orleans hadn't been left incomplete in 2005 because of lack of funding, if only the all-important levees surrounding the city hadn't been so inadequately constructed. At one point, Professor Robert Bea, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley, calls the breech of the levees "the most tragic failure of a civil engineered system in the history of the United States."
Obviously, nature was beyond anyone's control, but what happened before the hurricane struck -- and, more important, what didn't happen before -- was not. Yet, even if the people who built the levees never anticipated they'd have to withstand the force of a flood unleashed by a hurricane of that magnitude, what about the people who had the responsibility to send help after 80 percent of the city was flooded? Was simple human compassion beyond their control as well? Apparently, it was, and that may be Lee's opinion, but he doesn't need any voice-over narration to express it: It is repeated, sometimes in tears, sometimes in red rage, by victim after victim of Katrina's fury.
Lee makes no pretense of trying to tell "the other side" of the story because, well, what other sides could there possibly be? The irrefutable evidence of monumental incompetence is still piled on the streets of New Orleans. Despite his obvious outrage over the inadequacy of the Bush administration's post-hurricane responses, though, Lee doesn't place sole blame on the feds: The message here is that this was a systemic failure of massive proportions. From the horrifically incompetent response of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to the lack of a competent evacuation plan, to insurance agents finding ways to avoid paying people off by determining that their homes were damaged not by the hurricane but by flooding, to land speculators trying to take advantage of people's pain and grief to grab their vacant property for a song, to the Army Corps of Engineers declaring its intention to restore the levees to pre-Katrina conditions -- levees that failed at three key points in the city -- the system not only failed New Orleans, it abused it as well.
In all the coverage of Katrina and its aftermath, two statements took root in our collective memory: One was Bush telling "Brownie" -- FEMA Director Michael Brown -- that he was doing "a heck of a job." The other was musician Kanye West charging on a telethon for Katrina victims that "Bush doesn't care about black people." Brownie, it turned out, was doing something less than a heck of a job. But West's charge is clearly a bit more challenging. Was institutional racism at the heart of the system's failure to respond to the crisis? Or was it "only" institutional incompetence? Lee allows many of his interview subjects to make the charge that the post-hurricane neglect was racist, but one of the strengths of the film is that he never goes for simple answers. The fact that New Orleans was largely an African American city before Katrina may have contributed to the government's monumental ineptitude, but the film points out that the Gulf Coast and Louisiana as a whole have been neglected and exploited for decades -- ever since oil and natural gas were discovered off the coast and the state began fulfilling a large percentage of the country's energy needs while reaping few economic benefits in return.
Activists like Harry Belafonte, the Rev. Al Sharpton and musicians such as Terence Blanchard (whose beautifully evocative score contributes mightily to the overall power of the film) see a pattern of neglect in the government's response to Katrina that prompts them to question if the response would be similar if the population at the epicenter of the disaster were not largely African American. Many of the interview subjects point out that while the nation responded to the devastation of the tsunami in Indonesia within two days, it took FEMA five days to learn what everyone watching CNN already knew: that thousands of displaced city residents were being housed in the convention center. Others point to how much money and resources are directed toward the war in Iraq while FEMA couldn't get trailers to New Orleans to house the displaced victims.
Overall, Lee interviewed more than 100 people for the film. Some, like Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, are well known, thanks largely to the unrelenting cable news coverage of the hurricane and its aftermath and, more recently, the New Orleans mayoral race. While other politicians, like President Bush, Condoleezza Rice (famously caught shoe shopping while New Orleans begged for aid) and Michael Brown, are not interviewed but justifiably hung out to dry, Blanco and Nagin more or less get a pass (although Nagin's crowing story of taking a shower on Air Force One and keeping Bush waiting while he spends another five minutes under the water certainly suggest that his priorities might have been a little off while his city was under water of another kind).
The real "stars" of the film are people -- black and white -- whom you've never heard of before, but will probably never forget after you hear their stories. Some are angry, like the irrepressibly eloquent Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, some broken, some inconsolable, but the theme that runs through all the interviews is incomprehension. How could this have happened? As hard as it is for them to wrap their minds around the magnitude of Katrina's power, it is even harder to comprehend how so little was done to prepare for her arrival or to help her victims.
Of the film's four sections, the first two are the most powerful because the focus is exclusively on the hours leading up to Katrina making landfall, the breech of the levees and the human devastation in the days immediately following. One man recalls with quiet dignity how his elderly mother died while they were being housed at the Superdome and he had to push her body out of the way. Another recalls having to leave the body of his mother behind when he had to abandon his house. He left a hastily scrawled note to identify her. While there may be scattered moments of minor redundancy as the litany of despair goes on, it's hard to look away from the raw truth of these very human stories.
If this were a Hollywood feature film, the director would probably reorder things a bit to ensure a whiz-bang finale. But real life doesn't quite work that way, and the truth is that the past 12 months have been prolonged agony for many Gulf Coast residents, who waited months for FEMA trailers only to find they wouldn't withstand a slight breeze, much less another hurricane. Land speculators have descended like birds of prey and the "good hands" of insurance companies have turned out to be empty, in many cases. Bureaucracy, alas, isn't sexy, but for the people of New Orleans, it's insult piling on to injury.
As a film, "Levees" is a significant and exhaustive achievement. Although it can be argued that it might have been even more effective if it had been edited down a bit, the power of its human stories compensates for whatever minor flaws it has. In an era where documentary filmmaking has never been more prolific or more valuable as a tool for political change, "Levees" makes statements that are likely to resonate long after New Orleans is rebuilt and its people have returned home.
'WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE'
Nearly a year after Katrina hit, Spike Lee's latest asks tough questions and lets the victims describe their incalculable heartbreak for themselves
- David Wiegand, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, August 21, 2006
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts: Documentary. Directed by Spike Lee. Acts 1 and 2, 9 p.m. tonight; Acts 3 and 4, Tuesday, with repeated broadcasts through Sept. 13, HBO.
Next week, the media will find its collective way back to New Orleans to mark the first anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina hit the Crescent City with historic and singular force. Inevitably, the news accounts will focus on how much is still undone, how many displaced people are still living in Texas, Utah and Oklahoma, how many lives were lost, how many others broken. Inevitably, the reports will ask the question: Will New Orleans ever find its way home again?
Spike Lee's four-hour "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" is a documentary about multiple tragedies. The film asks many questions, implies answers for the easier ones, but ultimately concludes that some are simply beyond answering. Those are the questions posed in stories of incalculable human heartbreak:
A college student comes back to the city to look for his mother and is told by officials that no bodies were found in the house he shared with her. He is relieved, until he goes to the house and finds it completely locked up, indicating that no one had ever gone inside to check. If they had, they would have found his mother's body, beneath the toppled refrigerator.
Months after the hurricane has passed, a woman separated from her family sees a news report that a young girl's body has been found in some rubble. The child is wearing a backpack. The woman's 5-year-old daughter, Serena, never went anywhere without her backpack. Later, an impossibly small white coffin is lowered into a grave and the mother's keening dies away as she walks slowly across the cemetery grass.
An elderly man whose wife is wheelchair-bound somehow manages to drag her to the roof of their home as the floodwaters rise. He holds on to her as long as he can but finally, he can only watch as she disappears in the water.
These are the tragedies you expect to tear you apart, and they do. But you may also find yourself equally affected by the other tragedies at the heart of the film. So much of what happened could have been avoided by a series of "if onlys": if only the governments -- federal, state and local -- had done even minimal planning for evacuating the city, if only the study of how a Category 3 hurricane would affect New Orleans hadn't been left incomplete in 2005 because of lack of funding, if only the all-important levees surrounding the city hadn't been so inadequately constructed. At one point, Professor Robert Bea, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley, calls the breech of the levees "the most tragic failure of a civil engineered system in the history of the United States."
Obviously, nature was beyond anyone's control, but what happened before the hurricane struck -- and, more important, what didn't happen before -- was not. Yet, even if the people who built the levees never anticipated they'd have to withstand the force of a flood unleashed by a hurricane of that magnitude, what about the people who had the responsibility to send help after 80 percent of the city was flooded? Was simple human compassion beyond their control as well? Apparently, it was, and that may be Lee's opinion, but he doesn't need any voice-over narration to express it: It is repeated, sometimes in tears, sometimes in red rage, by victim after victim of Katrina's fury.
Lee makes no pretense of trying to tell "the other side" of the story because, well, what other sides could there possibly be? The irrefutable evidence of monumental incompetence is still piled on the streets of New Orleans. Despite his obvious outrage over the inadequacy of the Bush administration's post-hurricane responses, though, Lee doesn't place sole blame on the feds: The message here is that this was a systemic failure of massive proportions. From the horrifically incompetent response of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to the lack of a competent evacuation plan, to insurance agents finding ways to avoid paying people off by determining that their homes were damaged not by the hurricane but by flooding, to land speculators trying to take advantage of people's pain and grief to grab their vacant property for a song, to the Army Corps of Engineers declaring its intention to restore the levees to pre-Katrina conditions -- levees that failed at three key points in the city -- the system not only failed New Orleans, it abused it as well.
In all the coverage of Katrina and its aftermath, two statements took root in our collective memory: One was Bush telling "Brownie" -- FEMA Director Michael Brown -- that he was doing "a heck of a job." The other was musician Kanye West charging on a telethon for Katrina victims that "Bush doesn't care about black people." Brownie, it turned out, was doing something less than a heck of a job. But West's charge is clearly a bit more challenging. Was institutional racism at the heart of the system's failure to respond to the crisis? Or was it "only" institutional incompetence? Lee allows many of his interview subjects to make the charge that the post-hurricane neglect was racist, but one of the strengths of the film is that he never goes for simple answers. The fact that New Orleans was largely an African American city before Katrina may have contributed to the government's monumental ineptitude, but the film points out that the Gulf Coast and Louisiana as a whole have been neglected and exploited for decades -- ever since oil and natural gas were discovered off the coast and the state began fulfilling a large percentage of the country's energy needs while reaping few economic benefits in return.
Activists like Harry Belafonte, the Rev. Al Sharpton and musicians such as Terence Blanchard (whose beautifully evocative score contributes mightily to the overall power of the film) see a pattern of neglect in the government's response to Katrina that prompts them to question if the response would be similar if the population at the epicenter of the disaster were not largely African American. Many of the interview subjects point out that while the nation responded to the devastation of the tsunami in Indonesia within two days, it took FEMA five days to learn what everyone watching CNN already knew: that thousands of displaced city residents were being housed in the convention center. Others point to how much money and resources are directed toward the war in Iraq while FEMA couldn't get trailers to New Orleans to house the displaced victims.
Overall, Lee interviewed more than 100 people for the film. Some, like Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, are well known, thanks largely to the unrelenting cable news coverage of the hurricane and its aftermath and, more recently, the New Orleans mayoral race. While other politicians, like President Bush, Condoleezza Rice (famously caught shoe shopping while New Orleans begged for aid) and Michael Brown, are not interviewed but justifiably hung out to dry, Blanco and Nagin more or less get a pass (although Nagin's crowing story of taking a shower on Air Force One and keeping Bush waiting while he spends another five minutes under the water certainly suggest that his priorities might have been a little off while his city was under water of another kind).
The real "stars" of the film are people -- black and white -- whom you've never heard of before, but will probably never forget after you hear their stories. Some are angry, like the irrepressibly eloquent Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, some broken, some inconsolable, but the theme that runs through all the interviews is incomprehension. How could this have happened? As hard as it is for them to wrap their minds around the magnitude of Katrina's power, it is even harder to comprehend how so little was done to prepare for her arrival or to help her victims.
Of the film's four sections, the first two are the most powerful because the focus is exclusively on the hours leading up to Katrina making landfall, the breech of the levees and the human devastation in the days immediately following. One man recalls with quiet dignity how his elderly mother died while they were being housed at the Superdome and he had to push her body out of the way. Another recalls having to leave the body of his mother behind when he had to abandon his house. He left a hastily scrawled note to identify her. While there may be scattered moments of minor redundancy as the litany of despair goes on, it's hard to look away from the raw truth of these very human stories.
If this were a Hollywood feature film, the director would probably reorder things a bit to ensure a whiz-bang finale. But real life doesn't quite work that way, and the truth is that the past 12 months have been prolonged agony for many Gulf Coast residents, who waited months for FEMA trailers only to find they wouldn't withstand a slight breeze, much less another hurricane. Land speculators have descended like birds of prey and the "good hands" of insurance companies have turned out to be empty, in many cases. Bureaucracy, alas, isn't sexy, but for the people of New Orleans, it's insult piling on to injury.
As a film, "Levees" is a significant and exhaustive achievement. Although it can be argued that it might have been even more effective if it had been edited down a bit, the power of its human stories compensates for whatever minor flaws it has. In an era where documentary filmmaking has never been more prolific or more valuable as a tool for political change, "Levees" makes statements that are likely to resonate long after New Orleans is rebuilt and its people have returned home.
