'Trouble the Water'
MOVIE REVIEW
The documentary on Hurricane Katrina's impact on a spirited New Orleans family won the grand jury prize at Sundance for its unique take on the 2005 disaster.
"Trouble the Water," a stirring documentary on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, is more than a keenly dramatic look at how this country treats the poor and dispossessed. It's also a film that was hijacked by its subjects. They saw an opportunity, they took it, and the grand jury prize at Sundance was the result.
In fact, the opening scene of "Trouble" shows exactly how it happened. New York documentarians Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, longtime associates of Michael Moore, were in Alexandria, La., interviewing people at a Red Cross shelter when Kim Roberts and her husband, Scott, literally walked into the frame.
"I want to tell people what I been through," Kim says on camera about home movie footage she shot in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward as the flood unfolded. "This needs to be worldwide. Nobody's got what I got." Which turned out to be both true as well as no more than half the story.
Kim Roberts' footage, shot with a video camera she'd bought on the street for $20 only the week before, gives a rare from-the-ground-up look at what it's like to be flooded out of your house. We watch in hypnotized horror as the waters rise so high they almost obliterate the corner stop sign, forcing the Roberts and their extended family to take precarious refuge in their attic.
Startling as that footage is, however, it takes up only about 15 minutes of "Trouble the Water." The documentary's best asset is not what Kim shot, but the woman herself.
With her buoyant, naturally dramatic personality (she ended up giving birth to a daughter in Utah just days before the Sundance award ceremony), bold, nervy Kim has the kind of intensely charismatic spirit documentary directors dream about. With her as our guide, "Trouble the Water" looks at the reality of New Orleans from the inside.
The tour starts before the flood does, with Kim showing us a hard-scrabble neighborhood of genuine poverty, but revealing the spirit and sense of community of "the world we had before the storm."
"Trouble" really kicks into gear after the flood, when the Roberts' experiences and those of family members and friends expose how things went down. As Danny Glover, one of the film's executive producers, has said, Katrina "did not turn the region into a Third World country. . . . It revealed one."
