“At this time, there is no rescue team,” apologizes the 911 operator to a woman about to drown in her attic.
This conversation is part of a collection of 911 calls that plays after we watch Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her family deal with their own flooded attic. It’s a terrifying scene, captured by Roberts herself with her camcorder. Trouble the Water is a documentary built around moments like these, sometimes captured first-hand by Roberts and sometimes retold afterwards. Through the video and stories, we witness the disaster as it happens. And watching a disaster like Hurricane Katrina from this perspective can be infuriating.
We know the stories about Katrina — the anarchy in the Superdome, the fumbled response by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the bureaucratic incompetence that came afterwards. It’s another thing, though, to face the people who lived through it. Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, who both worked under the tutelage of Michael Moore, know how to make it personal. Unlike their mentor, though, they focus on their subject more than themselves. In this case, the subject is Roberts, and the directors let her outsized personality inform the direction of the film. They integrate footage Roberts recorded before, during and after Katrina, but there doesn’t seem to be much of it. You can’t fault her for that — she turned off the camera to ensure her neighbours’ survival.
Without that footage, we’re left with just recounted moments. These moments evoke anger and confusion over how poorly the disaster was handled; from the lack of rescue teams, to American soldiers threatening to shoot survivors to keep them off a decommissioned Naval base, to the warden and guards leaving prisoners to fend for themselves in flooding prisons. Each moment resonates by itself, but the narrative thread needed to hold it all together remains elusive. Trouble the Water feels scattered, and Roberts’s story of surviving Katrina gets lost in the many indulgent tangents of the directors.
Near the end of the documentary and almost a year after Katrina, a bubbly public relations girl for the city gushes about how the 20 per cent of New Orleans that tourists care about remained undamaged as she dances along to a promotional DVD. It’s a tangential moment unrelated to Roberts’s story, but it’s a reminder of how quickly people want to forget the Katrina disaster. As meandering as the film can be, Trouble the Water remains a powerful and evocative reminder that no one will be forgetting anytime soon.
Post the first comment: (Login or Register)