Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble The Water
has something that few other documentaries or news reports about Hurricane
Katrina can boast: a big chunk of footage shot by a New Orleans resident just
before, during, and after the storm. Kim Roberts, an aspiring musician and
part-time hustler pre-Katrina, stuck her camera out of her front door as the
waters rose, and her ground-level, first-person view of the destruction is as
heart-stopping as any action-movie special effect.
Lessin and Deal met Kim
and her husband Scott two weeks after the storm, while working on a documentary
about Louisiana National Guardsmen newly redeployed to their home from Iraq.
When the Guard's higher-ups proved uncooperative, the filmmakers followed the Roberts
instead, tracking the couple's long waits for government assistance, and their
attempts to reboot their lives. As harsh as Katrina was, it became a
character-building adventure for the Roberts and many of their neighbors.
Before, they were trapped in a cycle of poverty and occasional criminality;
afterward, once they got to see more of the country, and to understand how the
country sees them,
they experienced a turnaround in self-esteem.
Trouble The Water is infuriating in its
depiction of helpless Americans getting left behind, and uplifting in the way
it shows the Roberts putting their lives together, but it's also frustrating,
because it lacks some focus. It starts off being about the footage Kim shot,
but she didn't shoot a lot, and anyone coming to Trouble The Water looking for an insider's
take on the storm and its immediate aftermath will be disappointed to find that
the bulk of the film takes place post-emergency. Even more bothersome is how
Lessin and Deal keep steering away from the most persistently unsettling part
of the Hurricane Katrina story, having to do with the multiple ways the rights
of American citizens were taken away, by the suspicious and the well-meaning
alike. Given that the filmmakers' original idea for their project stalled out
due to lack of access, it's disappointing that they didn't explore that angle
more. Even the generally upbeat Roberts and their friends note the promises and
lies that have been exposed by their predicament. "Freedom exists," one of
their neighbors says. "There's just… limitations on the freedom."