A scene from the Spike Lee film When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. (HBO Enterprises)
Do the Right Thing. Jungle Fever. Malcolm X. 4 Little Girls. And so on. U.S. director Spike Lee has spent most of the past two decades making films that assert his pointed, provocative opinions on American race relations. It would seem safe to assume, then, that his epic study of last summer’s devastating Hurricane Katrina — which stranded thousands of mostly black survivors in the floodwaters of New Orleans while rescue efforts to reach them faltered — would impart Lee’s personally biased account of the disaster.
That assumption fails. “We come to you with facts. We come to you with eyewitness accounts. We come to you because we were there before the storm hit, we were there when the storm hit, we were there after the storm and we’re still there,” New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin says in the documentary’s first dialogue, clipped from his appearance at congressional hearings on Katrina. That statement holds true throughout the documentary’s four-hour run.
Lee does not deviate from the official conclusions about Katrina — New Orleans’s levees were too poorly constructed to withstand the storm; rescue and relief efforts were impaired by failures at every level of government — but includes no narrator to drive those points home. Instead, he uses dozens of interviews (including Nagin, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, trumpeter Terence Blanchard, rap star Kanye West, conflicted survivors like Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, historians and engineers) to shape a gripping, tear-jerking account of the storm’s approach, arrival and aftermath.
When the Levees Broke, more than any other Spike Lee joint, deserves a place of pride in the Smithsonian’s permanent archive of American history.
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts screens at TIFF on Sept. 15 and 16.
Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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