Produced by Jacqueline Glover, Spike Lee, Sheila Nevins, Samuel D. Pollard, and Bruce Robinson; directed by Spike Lee; cinematography by Cliff Charles; edited by Geeta Gandbhir, Nancy Novack, and Samuel D. Pollard; music by Terrence Blanchard; with Shelton Shakespeare Alexander, Harry Belafonte, Terrence Blanchard, Wilhelmina Blanchard, Kathleen Blanco, Douglas Brinkley, Karen Carter, Eddie Compass, Michael Eric Dyson, Paris Ervin, Herbert Freeman, Jr., Louella Givens, Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, Mitch Landrieu, Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, Ben Marble, Wynton Marsalis, Gina Montanna, Mark Morial, Arthur Morrell, Ray Nagin, Soledad O'Brien, Sean Penn, Wendell Pierce, Kimberly Polk, Garland Robinette, Heny ‘Jr.' Rodriguez, Rev. Al Sharpton, Col. Lewis Stetliff, Ivor van Heerden, and Kanye West. Color, 255 mins. HBO.
It has been an interesting year for Spike Lee fans. The director has released two of the finest works of his career, representing a significant bounce-back from the muddle of ideas that was She Hate Me . At the same time, Lee's 2006 renaissance does, to some extent, come at the expense of many of the brasher, more confrontational aspects of his personality as a filmmaker. The March 2006 theatrical release of Inside Man found Lee helming a deft, taut heist picture, an actorly face-off between Denzel Washington and Clive Owen with the great Jodie Foster thrown in almost as a bonus. The film displays several classic Leeisms: chronological shifting signified with washed-out film stock; a dig at NYPD racial insensitivity; and of course, the ‘people-mover' shot. (Why should Washington run up to a building when he can float forward like a hovering angel?) There was no doubt who was behind the camera calling the shots, and yet Lee placed his style squarely in the service of Russell Gewirtz's screenplay and its old-school genre mechanics, bringing them to life with an ambiance that can only be described as playful.
Then, this August, HBO premiered When the Levees Broke, Lee's four-hour documentary epic on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The film finds Lee moving from strength to strength, but although the seething anger in Levees is quite palpable, like its predecessor, it eschews extravagant stylistic touches or the Brechtian modernism of Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever . Assembling his argument with great care and patience, Lee seems to prefer staying out of the way of the damning facts. Unlike Inside Man, which was a job-for-hire somewhat personalized by a strong auteur, When the Levees Broke was a project Lee sought out. It is, in many respects, a highly personal piece of filmmaking. But there is also a sense of Lee holding back, choosing to adhere to the sort of documentary conventions (talking heads, unadorned images from the news media, a general faith in the power of testimony) that the director could just as easily (and forcefully) have critiqued from within.
But like Oliver Stone (and the comparison ends on this point alone ), Lee no doubt realizes that he's a polarizing filmmaker, someone to whom a large segment of the population won't listen, just because of who he is. As with Inside Man , but for a very different purpose, Lee chooses to downplay the pyrotechnical cinematic devices, clearly a strategic choice.
In both cases the critical plaudits are fairly predictable and completely deserved. But let it be said, many of these kudos have praised Lee's ‘discipline,' touching however indirectly on a patently racist meme that has dogged Spike Lee practically throughout his entire career. ‘Lee is talented,' goes the refrain, ‘but undisciplined.' (Try a Google search on ‘Spike Lee' and ‘discipline.' The results are sad.) So although Lee's commitment to rather traditional documentary form for Levees coincides with the vested interests of many of Lee's harshest critics (mostly a desire for domestication and ‘norming'), it also represents a reasoned and largely appropriate esthetic decision on his part, one that should in no way be read as capitulation. In essence, History gave Lee an assignment—one he chose to answer rather than subvert.
The assignment—the moral charge, really—was to construct a document, a memorial to the human toll of institutional indifference and its continuing aftermath. In this respect, four hours is barely enough, although Levees is astonishing in its scope and acuity. Most projects like this tend to serve as externalizations of memory, tools that allow the past to become History and thereby afford us the luxury of forgetting. But instead Lee attempts to display not only what happened on the Gulf Coast and why, but also how, in terms of the shattered lives of many in New Orleans and surrounding areas, Katrina may as well have hit yesterday. When the Levees Broke is a one-year anniversary marker that mostly demonstrates the continuing lack of assistance, the gross incompetence, and the day-to-day grind of trying to rebuild—with virtually no adequate governmental support. With Levees , Lee has assembled a kind of Katrina media archive, working overtime to make sure that the failure of FEMA and Homeland Security to assist the survivors of the hurricane will always be available on videotape for posterity to judge as it should. (This racist, classist nonresponse represents the Bush Administration's second-biggest cock-up, showing that they also know how to use passivity as a weapon of mass destruction.)
Jazz composer and regular Lee collaborator Terence Blanchard marches a traditional New Orleans processional funeral
At the same time, Lee is also keeping the Katrina fiasco right where it belongs: in the present tense, its impact still felt again and again. In the same way that Alain Resnais's landmark documentary Night and Fog concludes by reminding us that the forces that created the Holocaust are always ready to mobilize again, Levees contextualizes and highlights the government's sheer racism and willingness to force the poor to fend for themselves, not as aberrations but as systemic elements of American capitalism. The forces of ignorance surge and recede (perhaps not always as spectacularly as in the Katrina aftermath), but the immiseration of much of Louisiana is always the necessary economic backdrop.
Lee doesn't just help us to remember what happened, who did what to whom. A bit like Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial, Levees serves as an antimonument, a refusal to allow official revisionism and bureaucratic self-congratulation to put a happy face on tragedy by turning the spotlight on individual acts of heroism and can-do attitude—the typical building blocks of unctuous bourgeois myth. Instead, Lee complicates matters at every turn. Certainly the Bush Administration, FEMA, and the Army Corps of Engineers are held responsible for the mishandling of the aftermath in no uncertain terms, as they should be. But over the course of Lee's four acts (the hurricane, the flood, the emotional toll, and the ongoing struggle to rebuild despite the federal government), key figures such as Mayor Ray Nagin, Governor Kathleen Blanco, and former police chief Eddie Compass get a fair hearing, emerging as imperfect players caught up in a larger systemic failure. (Even disgraced FEMA chief Michael Brown catches a break, Penn Prof. Michael Eric Dyson taking care not to defend him, but making it clear that he was the government's designated scapegoat, and that Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff and President Bush should shoulder far more blame.) Lee also takes care to provide the larger context to the Katrina disaster that a majority of media outlets were (and still are) ill equipped to face. Yes, it's about race and class, a ‘Chocolate City' literally left to sink or swim. (A great moment in dark sarcasm: one survivor's T-shirt reads, ‘FEMA Evacuation Plan: Run, Motherfucker, Run.')
At the same time, Lee and his expert witnesses make clear that New Orleans, and Louisiana as a whole, were economically left for dead long before the storm made landfall. In Acts Three and Four, Lee and his interviewees make the case that, with its substandard housing and educational system, and with its oil and gas revenues pilfered via governmental tax shelters and offshore accounting, Louisiana has long been America's dirty little secret, forced for years to endure conditions analogous to those in the developing world, its plight receiving little or no media attention. Talk radio host Garland Robinette wisely refers to this plunder as “internal colonialism,” underscoring the naiveté of so many newscasters, indignant at the sight of a ‘Third World inside the First World.' (Most of the articles in the September 18th issue of The Nation explore how an economically decimated New Orleans was created well before it was destroyed. In particular, Adolph Reed, Jr.'s piece, “Undone by Neoliberalism,” is a must-read, since it details the laissez-faire policies that set the stage for New Orleans's outright collapse. Kanye West may be correct that President Bush and his cronies don't care about black people, but ideologues on both sides of the aisle, Reed contends, don't care about people, period.)
Because Lee has so wisely chosen to widen the frame on the Katrina disaster, providing both a brief cultural and economic history of New Orleans, as well as displaying the state of Louisiana's tactical impoverishment, there is a massive amount of information and personal testimony for his film to process. And, due to time constraints as well as the inherent limits of the film/TV medium in terms of offering large slabs of background data, there is only so much Levees can hope to achieve in four hours. So, even if Levees sometimes comes up short (for example, Act Three's discussion of post-Katrina depression and PTSD is left as an underdeveloped drop-in), for the most part Lee has assembled the definitive cinematic record of this dark, ongoing ‘moment' in U.S. history. Nevertheless, when Lee allows his directorial technique to fire on all cylinders, the results are more persuasive and far more moving than mere fact could ever hope to be. Certain moments of stark stylization—Wynton Marsalis singing “St. James Infirmary,” or Terrence Blanchard slowly walking down a demolished street playing the trumpet, or the disquieting final credits montage, set to Fats Domino's “Walkin' to New Orleans,” which clearly owes a debt to Lars von Trier's “Young Americans” sequence at the end of Dogville —are so powerful that I found myself wishing Lee had gone even further in using expressive filmic means to channel collective rage. But for the lion's share of Levees 's running time, Lee plays it clean, sometimes even seeming to subsume his methods within the translucent cloak of unreconstructed documentary objectivity. Only a few isolated passages feel like overcompensation, and these dips into the safe, familiar PBS style (most documentaries made for the P.O.V. series exemplify this tendency—content first, let formal issues take care of themselves) can occasionally lead Lee's sensibility astray. Some zoom-ins on crying interview subjects, for example, felt manipulative and intrusive, yet of a piece with much recent reality-based TV programming. But more often than not, When the Levees Broke reveals Lee's anger by steadily building an open-and-shut case for the prosecution. Certain segments—Dutch civil engineers explaining what a government can do for a city below sea level, when the resources are allocated; a man tearfully describing his evacuation from the Superdome, forced to leave his mother's body behind; and above all, the laser-sharp tongue-lashing that N.O. native Phyllis Montana LeBlanc has for everyone involved—will remain permanently imprinted on your consciousness, and Lee is wise enough to know that his contribution in these cases is to make space, just to listen . This is more than an artistic achievement; it is also a deeply humanistic one.
Cineaste, Vol. 32 No.1 (Winter 2006),54-56.
