Spike Lee’s four-hour epic portrait of New Orleans is less a documentary than a dirge, a eulogy with tears and impassioned speakers offering sorrowful and angry sermons.
Provocative and poignant, the film juxtaposes instances of personal misery with the big-picture class/race snub at the heart of the disaster in a stinging rebuke of the Bush administration, the Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA and other government agencies.
No matter how much Katrina coverage you’ve weathered, Lee’s expansive chronicle offers something different, a “morality play” about the country’s twisted priorities. It is relentlessly tough viewing.
“When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” will air on the first anniversary of the disaster for four hours beginning at 6 p.m. Tuesday on HBO. It premiered earlier this week on Monday and Tuesday.
Jazz is its steady undercurrent, made literal when a traditional New Orleans funeral parade holds aloft a casket marked “Katrina.”
In addition to civic leaders and politicians, Lee solicits a number of celebrities, including Harry Belafonte, Wynton Marsalis, Kanye West and, most jarringly, Sean Penn (he’s shown dragging a woman to safety, and later, self-consciously reflecting on his experience). But it’s the unknowns who leave the biggest impression.
Phyllis Montana LeBlanc lays it out with uncensored disgust, describing her horrific wait to be evacuated, her family’s homelessness, their four-month ordeal seeking a FEMA trailer, and her breakdown.
Katrina wasn’t just a systemic failure, since there was no system in place when the hurricane hit New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005. What Katrina turned out to be, Lee suggests, is a referendum on America, an eye-opening example of the disgraceful way a country treats certain of its people.
Four “acts” chronicle different aspects of the story, beginning with early predictions of the Category 5 storm. The noise, one survivor recalls, was “like a freight train in your ear hour after hour.” Lee doesn’t take sides in the debate about the explosions some witnesses claim to have heard. Some say the levees were intentionally bombed in order to flood the downscale 9th Ward and save more expensive properties. Historian Douglas Brinkley, a critical and compassionate voice throughout, calls that an urban myth.
With agonizing repetition, Lee trains the camera on bloated bodies floating in the water. Excruciating, but these shots are necessary documentation of the way American citizens died in a U.S. city. “People of color were wholly underattended,” Belafonte states.
The second hour zeroes in on Superdome evacuees and what one bystander calls the “shoot-in’, lootin’ and carryin’ on.” A foreign broadcaster reporting on “America’s underclass” is effectively embarrassing.
CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien’s famous on-air clash with FEMA’s Michael Brown is revisited. “What he was saying was not matching the pictures,” she says. “It was one of the more baffling interviews, because they seemed so out of touch with the reality” unfolding on TV for four days.
Lee reminds us that Dick Cheney was fly-fishing and Condoleezza Rice was shoe shopping while 80 percent of New Orleans was under water. President Bush took his time visiting the city, while his mother, Barbara, observing evacuees in Texas, blabbed that the storm is “working very well for them.”
The cruel ironies of the aftermath are recounted, from the phony press conference in front of the specially illuminated New Orleans government building (residents had no power and couldn’t watch the staged event), to Mayor Ray Nagin’s concern that the CIA would shut him up if he publicly told the truth about how bad things were. Only Nagin’s demand, broadcast several days into the crisis, that the Bush administration “get off your (expletive),” drew a response.
The last hours look at the incompetent response and citizens’ rage. Actor Wendell Pierce (“The Wire”), a New Orleans native, notes there is “a special circle of hell” reserved for insurance companies, which have found creative ways to deny benefits.
Lee is a master behind the lens, expertly weaving cultural history and political theory with personal struggles. He offers a final nod to the city’s resurgent spirit, as New Orleans citizens vow to remain true to their cultural legacy. But it all seems so overwhelmingly difficult in the wake of the country’s tragic failure of this place, these people.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
