Trouble the Water.

"There is by now a rich, although unheralded subgenre of independent films - shorts and features, ranging from avant-garde tone poem to vérité docudrama - dealing with Katrina and its aftermath," writes Dennis Lim, introducing an overview of that subgenre in the New York Times. "Trouble the Water, which won the grand jury prize for best documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and opens on Friday, is one of the best reviewed of these movies. It is also perhaps the one that most shrewdly navigates a problem that to some extent bedevils all filmmakers who take on this fraught subject: how to reconcile their outsider perspectives with the experiences of those who lived through the hurricane.... The decision to give pride of place to [Kimberly] Roberts's raw first-person footage and to grant the Robertses a guiding role in the documentary was both generous and astute, a way for [Carl] Deal and [Tia] Lessin to avoid telling too much of the story across the divides of race and class."

Updated through 8/23.

"[W]hat happened to Kimberly Roberts and her husband, Scott, and her drowned uncle and her hospitalized grandmother left to die is right there on the screen - always in the present tense," notes David Edelstein in New York. "The Robertses ruminate bitterly on a country that directs its vast resources elsewhere - to Iraq, for example - but always end their exchanges with praise for the soldiers’ good works and thanks to God.... Trouble the Water is ineradicably moving."

Related: Paul Tough's cover story for the NYT Magazine: "The city's disastrously low-performing school system was almost entirely washed away in the flood - many of the buildings were destroyed, the school board was taken over and all the teachers were fired. What is being built in its place is an educational landscape unlike any other, a radical experiment in reform."

Earlier: Reviews from Sundance and Nick Schager in Slant.

Updates, 8/21: "Fresh as a slap, the outrage of Katrina's mishandling comes flooding back in Trouble the Water, a documentary account so starkly surreal that at times it seems wrought from another century's folklore," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice.

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon:

In many ways, I think Kim Roberts's authorship, not just of her amazing storm footage or her music but of her life, is the true subject of Trouble the Water. We can have a "national conversation about race" until we all turn blue and keel over from boredom - Did we have it already? If so, what did we say? - but people like Kim and Scott Roberts don't generally have their own voices, or any other kind of autonomy....

Watching Trouble the Water last January at Sundance, in a theater packed with white folks in upscale ski garb - other than the Robertses, the only black person I'm sure I saw there was Danny Glover - was a peculiar, cathartic, almost explosive ritual. Say whatever you want to about the privilege and liberal guilt of that gathering. It's all true. Say that watching a movie in a Utah resort town with a bunch of people flown in from the coasts is an inadequate way to confront the horrifying legacy of Katrina, and that's true too. But that's how it felt.

"Beyond the opening scene's shocking storm footage, Trouble the Water keeps its disaster voyeurism minimal..., focusing instead on its main characters' relentless optimism," writes Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine. "Kim, Scott and another Katrina refugee, Brian, pack enough charm and personal redemption to make the shift entirely successful. Kim's discovery of her old rap EP and impromptu performance is a particularly eloquent scene, proving the survival of New Orleans' rich vernacular culture despite the indifferent city government's blind promotion of postcard-ready tourism as a means to top-down reconstruction. It's not the cathartic finale of your average monster movie, but it's about the happiest conclusion to be extracted from this never-ending disaster scenario."

Simon Abrams in the New York Press: "Essentials differences aside, Trouble the Water could just as easily be a disaster movie for all of its frighteningly unreal images of demolished buildings and scurrying military units ('This is like a movie, man,' Scott says as if on cue). It's not, however, because the film's real monster is the faceless, crippling inaction that settled in after Katrina. Filmmakers Deal and Lessin hit the streets to reveal the horrifying stagnation that turned New Orleans' Ninth Ward into a colossal fuck-up: one that, to this day, as the film's perfunctory but chilling afterword reminds us, remains a glaring open wound."

At indieWIRE, Michael Joshua Rowin admires the way the doc opens:

But even more vital is Water's second half, a portrait of Kimberly, friends, family, and neighbors literally building from the ruins on the road from New Orleans and, once settled back in the city, fighting against the lures of street life by standing up for themselves and their disenfranchised community. This, even as Katrina gives them every opportunity to permanently flee the "bottom of the barrel." One moment in particular poignantly imparts such life-affirming tenacity: Kimberly discovering the rap demo she recorded and feared lost in the flood, rapping to the accompaniment of her own voice an emotional song about enduring hardship. The song is called "Amazin'" - a fitting one-word description of Trouble the Water.

Updates, 8/22: "Ms Roberts, who often puts her faith in God but tends to take matters into her own capable hands, expresses little anger at the government," notes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "She isn't especially at peace with her country, just resigned, so much so that she almost shrugs when she delivers the movie's most devastating line, saying it felt as if 'we lost our citizenship.'... Save for some righteous indignation at the close, Trouble the Water makes its points without didacticism, perhaps guided by the Robertses, who are interested in surviving, not grandstanding."

David Fear in Time Out New York: "Trouble the Water's political-made-personal power to invoke both Anderson Cooper levels of rage and the sense that hope springs eternal rests solely with its main subjects; if you don’t feel the latter when Kimberly defiantly raps about survival at the end, you have no heart."

"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," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

Time's Richard Corliss finds it "an endlessly moving, artlessly magnificent tribute to people the government didn't think worth saving."

"Too much good cinema has sprung from Hurricane Katrina to label one of these works the definitive statement on the tragedy - When the Levees Broke, Kamp Katrina, Low and Behold, just to name a few - but after watching Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water, it's hard not to place this film at the top of the list." Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail.

Update, 8/23: "Surviving the storm is only the first part - what follows is not much easier, a painful exodus from the ruined city, in and out of shelters to long lines at less than helpful FEMA headquarters, a relocation attempt to Memphis, and finally, for this one intrepid couple, a permanent return to New Orleans," writes Marcy Dermansky. "Through what seems like sheer strength of character, Kim and Scott are able to forge a hard-earned happy ending for themselves - and the film."

Posted by dwhudson at August 18, 2008 6:21 AM