TV: Here Comes the Story of the Hurricane

But it’s actually when Lee gets all philosophical like that that the film is at its worst. The second half, Acts III and IV, is full of meandering digressions about the city’s cultural history and various lethargic segments following residents as they return to assess the damage. It’s also tainted by a sometimes shrill political tone—the worst part is a segment in Act II following two Mississippi men who crudely taunt Dick Cheney and spend several minutes congratulating themselves for a bravado that meant absolutely nothing.

For the most part, however, the first half—Acts I and II—is powerful and mostly understated filmmaking, a quietly matter-of-fact account of the storm and the few days leading up to and out of it. Lee’s visual style is simple but effective, with many talking-head interviews combined with news and amateur-video footage of the hurricane and its aftermath. He interviews a wide cross-section of Katrina survivors, climatology experts and public figures, including New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco. The harrowing first-person accounts of riding out the storm or trying to get out of the city in its aftermath are fascinating.

Lee himself remains an unobtrusive presence in the first two acts, but as the film’s second half moves away from the storm and into its political and social implications, his questions are heard more often (although he never appears on-screen) and he seems more guided by some of the interviewees (especially blowhard author Michael Eric Dyson) with obvious political agendas. To his credit, though, Lee allows the blame to spread around and doesn’t spare Nagin or Blanco, even though they agreed to appear in his movie. And some of his interviewees, especially passionately righteous New Orleans resident Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc, are so captivating that it almost doesn’t matter what they’re talking about.

Lee’s film, especially digested in one sitting, is so exhaustive that it’s often exhausting, and the filmmaker’s effort to include seemingly every possible angle and tangent related to the hurricane dilutes the power of the thing that he does the best, which is telling the human stories. The range of interviewees is so wide that after a while they tend to blend together, and there’s so much rhetoric from so many different sources that it eventually loses some of the force and import it should have.

A longtime New Yorker, Lee has dealt masterfully with his own hometown’s 9/11 disaster in two narrative feature films, 25th Hour and Inside Man, that used the event’s aftermath as a backdrop to tell stories infused with new realities and heightened tensions. The underrated FX series Thief did the same thing with Katrina, but Lee isn’t interested in oblique commentary here. His film may be overkill, but for a disaster as large as this, perhaps overkill is called for.