Venice diary - 'When the Levees Broke' review

Dave Calhoun reviews Spike Lee's Hurricane Katrina documentary.

Sep  1 2006

It's been a festival of disasters - real, not cinematic - so far in Venice. Yesterday, the four-hour warm-up to Oliver Stone's predictable 'World Trade Center' (does what it says on the tin) was Spike Lee's superb, marathon documentary on Hurricane Katrina and its after-effects, 'When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts'.

The film has already been shown on HBO in the US and is both a great achievement and a smart kick in the teeth to anyone who still deludes themselves that America is a place of equality where the federal and the local merge seamlessly and racial division is a thing of the past. Lee holds up Katrina as a mirror to a troubled nation. It's his best film for years.

Lee's film is as exhaustive, exhausting, unwieldy and aggressive as the chaos - social, political, economic and psychological - caused by Katrina itself when it hit New Orleans last year. He employs talking heads, news reports and location footage - no voiceover, no explanatory titles - to retell the story of the crisis and examine the fall out right up to the present day when tens of thousands of citizens (or 'refugees', as the insulting term has it) remain displaced in other states across the country and hundreds of thousands of others still find it impossible to claim a decent insurance payout.

Lee's main protests are that the federal reaction came far too late; that the levees in New Orleans were always woefully inadequate (and he warns that their rebuilding doesn't look too promising either); that the disaster effort was poorly managed by FEMA; and that, critically and more generally, Louisiana is a state that is systematically bled dry by the federal goverment and too often ignored by Washington because of the simple fact that its population is predominantly black and poor.

Lee's interviewees are wide-ranging, from ample citizens of New Orleans to the city's mayor Ray Nagin and Sean Penn. He rams his point home with facts and opinion, saddening images, terrible stories, and never vitriol. Compared to Michael Moore, say, Lee's approach is measured and never hysterical. He doesn't need to shout; the sad facts speak for themselves.

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