Review: "Trouble the Water"

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the only people who didn't seem to understand the gravity of the situation was the United States Government. The category 3 storm made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, breaching the city's levees and flooding more than 80% of the city, killing thousands and displacing tens of thousands more. It was destruction on a Biblical scale, a disaster that we were woefully unprepared for. America sat glued to its television screens as one of its most venerable cities sank beneath the vengeful waters of Mother Nature.

But for all of the round the clock news footage and on the scene reports, there is one thing that the reporters consistently failed to capture - the personal side of the tragedy. No number of human interest stories can amount to the tale as told by the the people who lived it as it was happening, and that is just what Trouble the Water, the new documentary by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, does.

Culled from the home videos of Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband Scott, two poverty-stricken, aspiring rap artists living in New Orleans, Trouble the Water paints a unique and deeply intimate portrait of a national disaster and the bureaucratic failure of the government to do anything about it.

Unable to afford transportation out of the city, Kim and Scott hold their ground, and end up trapped in their own home with their family and neighbors, surrounded by water and cut off from the rest of the world. Through Roberts' eyes we see the hurricane make landfall, and even more devastating we watch as they fall through the cracks of a system totally unprepared for a disaster of that magnitude. Kim puts a human face on the suffering of New Orleans, but also on its resilience as well. Her determination and her strength are a testament to the human spirit, even as we witness the height of human failure around her.

There are no words to accurately describe the kind of tragedy where elderly hospital patients are left behind to die, where governments do not use every resource at their disposal to evacuate its citizens from certain death, where displaced citizens are turned away from nearly empty military bases at the point of an M-16, and where incompetent leaders are rewarded for their efforts (disgraced FEMA chief Michael Brown, the credits inform us, is now a disaster management consultant and motivational speaker). I can't even begin to wrap my brain around what these people went through, and how grossly mishandled the situation was, and in many ways still is today. How do you justify rebuilding a city's ritzy tourist spots, when its poverty stricken areas are still in ruin three years later?

The filmmakers never try to answer that question, nor do they offer any solutions. Their goal instead is to place a human face on the tragedy rather than push for any agenda other than the fact that this cannot be allowed to happen again. It is impossible to watch this film and not feel some degree of outrage. The film itself tends to become unfocused in its later half, losing sight of the tragedy at hand and veering off into unnecessary explorations of Kim's burgeoning rap career (whose music can be a bit inappropriate for the desired mood), but that does not diminish the overwhelming power of its subject and its stark indictment of bureaucracy gone wrong.

Trouble the Water may not be the essential film about Katrina, it may not be the definitive statement of the horrors that befell New Orleans in August 2005, but there is something unique and indeed quite moving about seeing the tragedy from the perspective of those who survived it, who lived it and saw it for what it was. It invites us to step into the shoes of people who the government forgot, and demands that we refuse to do the same.

GRADE - *** (out of four)

TROUBLE THE WATER; Directed by Carl Deal, Tia Lessin; Featuring Kimberly Rivers Roberts, Scott Roberts; Not Rated