On TV: Spike Lee's portrait of the debacle of Katrina

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By MELANIE McFARLANDP-I TELEVISION CRITIC
As Hurricane Katrina raked her claws across her home, New Orleans resident Gina Montana remembers repeating one word out loud, over and over again: "Stabilize."
Call it a mantra. Call it a prayer. A year after Katrina and the floods that followed her drowned the Crescent City, it has yet to get a meaningful response.
Beyond the historic tragedy we acknowledge Katrina's aftermath to be, the government's spectacular failure of New Orleans stands as a glaring mark of shame on our country. One of America's major cities is still face down in the mud, with its citizens still uprooted and unable to return home, its true culture under threat of being scattered and Disneyfied.
Spike Lee's HBO documentary, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," stands as both a reminder and a dedication to the resilient spirit of its people and their pride in New Orleans' complex, difficult history.
Outstripping those ideas in significance, though, is the film's wealth and breadth of historical accounts and multifaceted analysis. Experts of every stripe illustrate the absurdist levels of bureaucratic bungling that left New Orleaneans to starve and swelter in the broiling heat.
The oral accounts of the city's residents reveal angles otherwise unexamined by the mainstream national media. The poorest citizens, most of them black, have a lengthy, distressing relationship with those levees. Put together, theirs is a tale of a population that has been taken advantage of and abandoned by its country for decades.
"When the Levees Broke" is a beautiful elegy for the city, set to a haunting original score by jazz composer and NOLA native son Terence Blanchard. Simultaneously, it is a tapestry that connects the disaster to sources beyond the hurricane. Engineering neglect may have been the primary cause of New Orleans' destruction, but in Lee's documentary, political ignorance, corporate greed and inhumane, unethical behavior by oil, insurance and land developers join forces to stymie its restoration.
And there are sequences that rob you of any words, like watching Blanchard walk his elderly mother through the muddy shell she once called home. The acute pain in her sobs has no name. You can only cry along with her.
Lee began filming "When the Levees Broke" three months after Katrina, visiting the Gulf Coast eight times and culling close to 100 interviews, the majority of them emotionally devastating, some darkly humorous.

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Lee and cameraman Cliff Charles train most of their focus on New Orleanians like Montana. Some have poetic observations like Shelton "Shakespeare" Alexander; others, including the acerbic, witty Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, lace their bitter accounts with poisonous punch lines.
The four-part documentary also contains the obligatory celebrity takes, although interviews with Sean Penn, Kanye West, New Orleans native Wynton Marsalis, CNN's Soledad O'Brien and Harry Belafonte are brief and appropriate to their place in the story.
The director limits his scope to people who had the expertise to grant context to the event, or direct ties to New Orleans -- activists, journalists, residents of the flattened Ninth Ward and other parishes -- before and after the catastrophe. There are no interviews with White House officials blasted throughout the four hours, though the litany of news clips is more than enough to hang them on.
No opportunity for ex-FEMA director Michael "Brownie" Brown to tell his tale even if, as author Michael Eric Dyson points out, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff deserves more of the blame.
Lee corners Gov. Kathleen Lee Blanco, Mayor Ray Nagin and other local politicians, and lets citizens who had to live with their mistakes put their best and worst decisions into context.
Perhaps the strongest points in "When the Levees Broke," aside from the unflinching frames of destruction, are when Lee puts names and stories to anonymous news images and stories. We hear from Herbert Freeman Jr., whose mother was the dead woman in the wheelchair covered in a blanket, a symbol of the Convention Center's horror.
There's Kimberly Polk, who found out her 5-year-old daughter, Sarena, had drowned when the news reported the finding of a child's body with a backpack still attached.
Lee tracks down Dr. Ben Marble, the man who famously turned Dick Cheney's congressional expletive back on him during a New Orleans photo op and incorporates his footage into the film. "I thought it would be poetic justice to quote the Dick to the Dick," the emergency room physician explains in his interview.
Years from now, "When the Levees Broke" likely will stand as a monumental document that gave voices and faces to the victims in a way few other outlets have, creating a damning portrait of how government ineptitude cost American lives.
Splintered structures, refuse stacked on city streets and crushed homes are physical debris that can be cleared away. The ponderous psychological weight Katrina's victims are destined to drag around for decades is unbelievably gut-wrenching: nightmare memories of children finding parents' bodies, sons watching elderly mothers dying, and babies ripped from their father's arms. These are acts committed not by Katrina, but officials unprepared to handle such a grave emergency and unschooled in the necessity for empathy and consideration in the midst of such madness. Only this documentary has taken pains to make us understand this.
For all of the ways it retriggers our stunned outrage at the abandonment of Americans and the shortchanging of the nation's underclass, "When the Levees Broke" carefully reminds us of the beauty within New Orleans culture that refuses to die. The jazz, the food, the joyous mix of ethnicities are all woven throughout each act, adding urgency to the call for the city to be restored and its culture preserved.
One might think that four hours of this is too much; by the end, you realize that it's barely enough.
WATCH IT
"When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" at 9 p.m. Monday and 9 p.m. Tuesday on HBO, with all four hours running in a block on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Aug. 29, at 8 p.m.