“When the Levees Broke” by Spike Lee

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Film Information
Film Assessment
Conclusions
References

Introduction

Natural disasters have tremendous force, and no human-made device or phenomenon is able to stop or at least predict them. The eternal conflict between a man with nature very often turns out to cause horrible consequences, with lots of human lives taken and everyone else looking for the ones to blame. What Hurricane Katrina did was one example of such horror. People were taken aback by the disaster’s incredible force and speed of development and were finally left alone with their problems and needs after the hurricane. The documentary When the Levees Broke by the famous American director Spike Lee (2006) is the film that tells the story of the city of New Orleans after the natural disaster destroyed the very urban areas and lives of thousands of the city’s inhabitants.

Film Information

Plot

The very plot of the film develops in the city of New Orleans three months after the tragic events caused by Katrina (Lee, 2006). The initial episodes of the documentary feature the pictures of the city before and once after the hurricane with the soundtracks by famous American jazz and blues performers, including Louis Armstrong and Fats Domino (Lee, 2006). The director of the film follows his idea of interviewing as many various people dealing with New Orleans issues as possible, and the list of the interviewed persons ranges from Hollywood stars and politicians to journalists and ordinary people who have experienced personally what it is like to be left with no accommodation and no means for living and fighting diseases (Lee, 2006).

Sean Penn, Kanye West, etc. express themselves in the documentary and make its main point obvious – the flood and damage to the city could have been prevented, but the failed levees constructed wrongly by the American Army Engineers led to the tragedy (Lee, 2006).

Implicit Ideas

Accordingly, the main ideas of the documentary are all explicit, saying that ordinary people suffer most of all from Hurricane Katrina, and those responsible for fighting its consequences do not fulfill their duties in this respect (Lee, 2006). However, the implicit idea of the movie lies somewhere deeper, probably in criticizing the very political and social way of living in America, where there are powerful and powerless people, and discrimination on the basis of race is still observed. Kanye West’s speech blaming George Bush, Jr. for not caring about black people is one of the best expressions of this idea in the film by Spike Lee (Lee, 2006).

Film Assessment

Strengths

Needless to say, the film under consideration, as well as any other piece of art, has its own strong and weak points. Beginning from the former, such ideas should be mentioned as the comprehensive approach to the issue, focus on all the social groups involved in the tragedy, interviews not only with either ordinary people or statesmen but with all parties concerned, the comparative analysis of the city before and after the flood, etc. Spike Lee (2006) has the goal to show in this film the course of the tragedy and reflect on the lives of ordinary people and the effect of the hurricane on them. As well, the author is interested in the viewpoints of politicians and journalists that have no direct relation to the issue (Lee, 2006). All this makes the documentary a comprehensive and objective picture of the New Orleans events.

Weaknesses

Nevertheless, weak points can also be observed in the documentary. To be more exact, there is one weakness that might as well be considered a strong point. In other words, the true-to-life description of the events and the specific examples of people who lost everything during the hurricane and the flood are rather shocking and might make some people assess the film rather negatively (Lee, 2006). It is natural that people react in such a way to the scenes of violence or somebody’s tragedy and sorrow. Thus, a reflection of such events on the worldwide screens might be considered harmful to the psychology of the youngest generations of society. However, this is a rather controversial point of view as the more reality is shown, the more it is possible that people will start thinking about their actions and being responsible for them.

Conclusions

To conclude, the documentary When the Levees Broke by the famous American director Spike Lee (2006) is the film that tells us the story of the city of New Orleans after the natural disaster destroyed the very urban areas and the lives of thousands of the city inhabitants. The director interviews numerous people ranging from stars and statements to ordinary people of New Orleans, and concludes that only the broken levees did not allow the city to avoid the tragic flood. The documentary has strong and weak points, but the only weakness cannot cover the strengths of the film that, include the comprehensive approach to the issue and the objective delivery of information.

References

Lee, S. (Director). (2006). When the Levees Broke [Documentary]. United States: HBO.

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