The music of sorrow | The House Next Door

By Matt Zoller Seitz on August 21, 2006 in Film, Television Jump to Comments (0)

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Both halves of Spike Lee's controversial two-part documentary When the Levees Broke (tonight and Tuesday, 9 p.m.) open with montages so intense that no words can do them justice. Their power and beauty emphasize the movie's subtitle, A Requiem in Four Acts. That emphasis is so unmistakable that anyone who blasts When the Levees Broke as too inflammatory or not thorough enough is refusing to see and hear what's in front of them. Such complaints seek to discredit the movie for being something it's not instead of recognizing what it is: one of Lee's greatest and most deeply personal works.
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To read the rest of the Star-Ledger review, click here.

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I saw WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE in its full four hours last night, and I have a compulsion to thank Mr. Lee for this thoughtful piece of work. I am a New Orleanian, and though yesterday was the anniversary of Katrina, we are still very much a struggling city. Matt Zoller Seitz is right when he calls this a personal piece of filmmaking. Lee showed us as we are, and clearly had an emotional bond with his subjects. I learned news about people I knew: Mr. Mackie, who fixed the roof and installed gutters on my house four years ago, died of cancer after his treatment was interrupted by the storm. Paris, a student of my husbandâ€™s, found his mother dead in her house three weeks after the storm.

We have been hearing these sorts of stories all year, and not just in the newspaper. A co-worker of mine spent three days on a tree branch after his home was swept away in Violet, St. Bernard Parish. My best friend lost her childhood home and her current home in Chalmette, St. Bernard, water up to the ceilings. A client of mine was widowed because her husband stayed in their Lakewiew house and drowned, his body in the street for almost two weeks. I visited a house in New Orleans East that did not flood, but the 93 year old woman inside of it was stranded and died anyway; there was a large black mark on the dining room floor which I imagine was where her body lay to be found by her nephew. I understand how the rest of America might start seeing the Gulf Coast situation as histrionics after a year, but this story is more than a news feature to us.

Lee also took the time to address things I thought only locals thought about: the ridiculous comparisons of C. Ray Nagan and Rudy Giuliani; what its like to be in a FEMA trailer during a thunderstorm; the exaggerated reports of violence and crime three days after the storm; the widely held belief that the Industrial Canal levee was purposely dynamited in the Lower 9th Ward. Itâ€™s as if he is actually a New Orleanian too.

Though he has that reputation for incendiary material, Leeâ€™s polemic is channeled through the real and true stories of his interviewees. Decent people barely escaped with their lives and their dignity, and others did not. Our state was overwhelmed, and the federal government took a week to do anything; This cost lives. If you live in the earthquake zones of California or the terrorist targets of the East Cost, be very afraid, make plans to help the poor and elderly people in your neighborhood, and see this film.
Posted by Rachel in New Orleans on 2006-09-01 12:30:00 Actually, Levees does both. It won't win over any people who despise Lee on general principle, but I think its ambition and artistry are undeniable, and the crowd-pleasing, even blatantly populist touches work as well.
Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2006-08-21 21:52:00 I can't say I'm looking forward to this, but I can't wait to see it. As with all things, Katrina was so quickly consumed by the cable news desire to put a narrative on awful events (so we can see the third-act uplift, naturally) that even the much-praised moments (such as Anderson Cooper yelling angrily at a Louisiana senator) now seem to ring false.

So an attempt by a talented director to fashion an ACTUAL narrative, even in documentary form, sounds like just the right sort of tonic. Or just the right thing to rip open the wounds all over again.
Posted by Todd VanDerWerff on 2006-08-21 21:40:00

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