The 'New' New Orleans Blues

In one of several remarkable scenes from Spike Lee's new four-hour documentary, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem for New Orleans in Four Acts," a young man who sat out the flood in the hot and stenching Superdome surprises us with a recollection of grace. During a particularly desperate moment in the sewer--no water, no food, no help in sight--someone took charge. "There was this brother named Radio," he tells us, "...and he started clapping it up, like in a basketball game.... It was a big, big spirit; people just started singing praises."

Our storyteller continues in voiceover as the camera cuts to archived footage from the Superdome--a line of men and women dancing and singing, sweat visible through dirty T-shirts. "It was a proud moment for us. We marched around the 'dome, and that time I felt back to the Movement, the civil rights movement, when it was real powerful."

This appeal to "the Movement" is fitting. The poorest people in one of the poorest major cities in the United States are now even poorer than they were before, and the fact that most of them are black is no coincidence. Lee's team devotes a great deal of time and craft to the argument that the devastation resulted from an event in political history--not an event in weather. The film, which was shown for an emotional audience in New Orleans on Wednesday night, is at once a heartbroken hymn to a ravaged city, a comprehensive chronicle of the financial and geographical impact of the hurricane itself, and--most important--an essential new chapter in the unfinished story of the struggle for civil rights in America.

To write that chapter, Lee asked for and was granted four hours of airtime--twice the amount HBO had originally allotted for the documentary. Lee and a small crew visited New Orleans nine times and interviewed more than 80 people, including climatologists, politicians, engineers and on-site journalists, all of whom provide informative, though sometimes conflicting, accounts of many different facets of the hurricane. The story that emerges is one of colossal and criminal government failure on local, state and federal levels. Its many narrators cast an equally scornful eye on President Bush, FEMA, the insurance companies, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and the oil business.

One might expect that all this anger would amount to a tiresome polemic, especially at such a long running time, and moreover because Lee himself has never been known as a subtle filmmaker. At his best, however, he is a gifted one, with an exceptional sense of craft. Even his worst films have always showcased his inventive and remarkable ear for the profane poetry of American speech.

Here Lee wisely turns that ear to the voices of the ravaged city as they spin colorful and dramatic accounts of their experiences before, during and after the storm: the salty and delightful Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, a wife and mother who compares the storm to the 50-foot woman of B-movies ripping the skin off her home, and then delights us with an account of her near throw-down with a cold U.S. servicewoman; Gina Montana, who describes the agony of seeing people "treated like cattle," and reminds us that before it was called The Big Easy, New Orleans was known as The Town That Care Forgot; and finally, Fred Johnson, obscene and on-point, with a snorted dismissal of George Bush and his advisers: "These fools, they don't even know four dogs got four assholes!"

The interviews with the displaced victims of the storm, both black and white, are the most gripping, but Lee also provides political and historical context. He devotes a good deal of space to the testimony of local leaders, including Mayor Ray Nagin and then-Police Chief Eddie Compass--also giving airtime to those who would criticize their actions: Compass for spreading hysteria with his unsubstantiated claims of rapes and murder in the Superdome and subsequent star turn on the talk-show circuit; and Nagin for consulting with the business community about a mandatory evacuation of the city.