Spike's Storm

"When the Levees Broke"

by Spike Lee

Airing on HBO Monday, August 21, and Tuesday, August 22.

SPIKE LEE'S NEW DOCUMENTARY about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, When the Levees Broke, is an interesting piece of work. The film is alternately moving, depressing, and annoying. It is also long. Exceptionally long. Clocking in at just over four hours, and broken into four one hour acts (the first two air tonight, the last two tomorrow night), it is an emotionally overwhelming presentation of an American city beset by a tragedy from which it may never recover.

As in Lee's first documentary, 4 Little Girls, the director eschews the use of a narrator; allowing his subjects' stories to tie the piece together instead. Another holdover from 4 Little Girls is the composer, Terence Blanchard, whose music is both touching and haunting.

The first act focuses on the hurricane itself, and the people who stayed in the city through the storm. From the get-go, one is struck by the blasé attitude that the citizens took towards the massive hurricane; despite the fact that President Bush, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, and Mayor Ray Nagin all called for an evacuation of New Orleans, many residents decided to stay. Their attitude was summed up by Fred Johnson, identified in the film as a "cultural activist," who said "[E]verybody who's afraid should leave, but I ain't for that leavin'." Those who couldn't afford to leave but still felt unsafe went to the Superdome to ride out the storm.

One of the theories raised by Lee's subjects is that the levees were blown on purpose in order to flood the city's infamous 9th Ward. Lee neither embraces nor rejects this argument, but he does give some background into the reason why so many black residents claimed they heard explosions the night of the storm. "During Hurricane Betsy [in 1965] there were rumors, and it became almost an article of faith with people in the community, that the 9th Ward flooded because of an intentional breach of the levee," recalls Marc Morial, former mayor of New Orleans. "It was never investigated; it was neither proven nor disproven." The noise the residents heard was most likely a barge crashing into the walls holding back the water, but the conspiracy theory, a product of the racial paranoia that infects many of Lee's interviewees, is largely uncontested and is the beginning of an annoying undercurrent throughout the documentary.

The first act also pays homage to one of the few institutions to rise to the challenge of those dark days: the United States Coast Guard. "There's one agency we should single out for a job well done," according to Morial. The USCG took it upon themselves to rescue as many people as possible, by flying as many sorties as they could and ignoring regulations on flight time by running 16 hour shifts. (As with any other organization, Coast Guard pilots are only supposed to fly a certain number of hours in order to avoid fatigue and causing more casualties.)

While the first act does its best to portray the human tragedy, the second act focuses on the political tragedy. No major political figure emerges from these interviews unscathed. President Bush takes his share of abuse (his now infamous attaboy-- "You're doin' a heck of a job Brownie"--is replayed by Lee three times in rapid succession for full effect), but Blanco and Nagin aren't exempted by their political affiliation or race. The two receive particular criticism for letting political backbiting (Nagin, a Democrat, supported Blanco's Republican challenger, Rep. Bobby Jindal, in the gubernatorial contest) and internecine power struggles get in the way of helping the people of New Orleans.

While FEMA is portrayed as incompetent, and the Army Corps of Engineers as criminally negligent, Lee misses a golden opportunity to examine another of the key factors into the destruction of the levees: terrible mismanagement by the organization designed to keep the levees functioning, the Orleans Levee Board. In a piece that came out two weeks after Katrina's landfall, MSNBC's Lisa Myers reported that the Levee Board, among other wasteful purchases, blew $2.4 million on a fountain. Former Republican board member Billy Nungesser stated that they "misspent the money. . . . any dollar they wasted was a dollar that could have went in the levees." Nungesser was fired for trying to cut down on this wasteful spending; in his opinion, the board was "a cesspool of politics, that's all it was. . . . [Its purpose was to] provide jobs for people." At the time Myer's article was written, only two of the 11 construction projects underway were related to flood control.