New Orleans TIMES-PICAYUNE Review (Four Stars)
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Both Lessin and Deal have worked with documentarian/professional provocateur Michael Moore on previous projects, but they go about their business here with hardly a trace of the heavy-handedness or abrasiveness that so often drowns out Moore's message.
What they end up with is an utterly magnificent film, one that is as hard to forget as it is to ignore. As such, it is destined to live a long life, in peoples' minds and on scholars' shelves.
Built around home video shot by Kimberly Roberts as the storm approached -- and, equally, upon her indestructible spirit and cup-runneth-over charisma -- "Trouble the Water" is as authentic and as personal a peek inside Katrina as we are likely to get.
It's a harrowing journey. We are with the Robertses when, fully aware that everything in New Orleans is about to change, but without the financial means to get out of harm's way, they shoot some of the last pre-flood video of their neighborhood.
"I'm showing the world that we did have a world before the storm, " Kimberly Roberts says prophetically as the storm begins to blow in.
We are with them as the winds pick up. We are with them as the water rises. We are with them as they take refuge in their attic. And we are with them when they flee the only city they have ever really known.
"This'll be my first time out of the state of Louisiana, " an exhausted Scott Roberts says as, finally out of the flooded city, he heads for Memphis. (At the same time, he adds, apropos of everything, "I believe freedom exists somewhere. It's just limitations on the freedom.")
Kimberly Roberts also has such pearls scattered throughout the film, most of them embedded in her nearly-lost-to-the-storm music. She is a hip-hop artist who performs under the name Black Kold Madina, and it's that alter-ego that shines in an impromptu, show-stopping performance of her autobiographical rap "Amazing."
It is, in fact, amazing -- and so is she, in many ways.
Though they might live at the opposite end of the socioeconomic scale from some of the flooded-out residents of Lakeview and Uptown and Slidell and eastern New Orleans, it turns out that the Robertses are the perfect subjects to tell the Katrina story, because they are New Orleans.
They attend a protest at City Hall where a brass band accompanies the marchers. They thrive on -- and mourn the destruction of -- the unique community of their neighborhood. And, just like so many other residents of so many other parts of the city, the only thing Kimberly Roberts really, truly cared about retrieving from her flooded home was a picture of her mama, found on her living room wall after the waters receded, damaged but mostly intact.
Though the Robertses are the stars of the show, Deal and Lessen deserve praise for the brilliant interspersal of Kimberly's camcorder images among the news footage and their own post-flood footage -- including one particularly wrenching tracking shot of block after block of devastation in the 9th Ward, one year after the levees broke -- to tell the whole story.
Along the way there is humor, there is heartbreak and there is reason enough for outrage.
At Sundance this year, the film was given the Grand Jury Award in the U.S. documentary category, and that probably won't be the last time laurels are placed upon the heads of Deal and Lessen for this film. But the awards are just gravy.
The real victory of "Trouble the Water" is that the story is being told -- and that what happened on Aug. 29, 2005, won't soon be forgotten.
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