If you see the first 20 minutes of the documentary “Trouble the Water” (8:30 p.m. Eastern Thursday, HBO ****), you will undoubtedly watch the whole thing.
If the second half of the film doesn’t quite match the harrowing power of the first half, that’s because the early scenes of this Oscar-nominated documentary about Hurricane Katrina contain images that are astoundingly powerful.
The shaky footage of the storm’s arrival and the flooding of the Lower Ninth Ward shot by resident Kimberly Rivers Roberts does what the best non-fiction storytelling does: It puts you inside the situation. The view from Roberts’ attic as the water level threatened to engulf her street is something I’ll never forget.
The storm footage is intercut with scenes from the post-Katrina odyssey that she and her husband, Scott, endured. Among the final images of “Trouble the Water” are scenes of the Lower Ninth Ward on the one-year anniversary of the storm. The film’s concluding footage may well leave you with two reactions: a lingering sense of outrage at the way the city’s residents were treated during and after the hurricane, and curiosity about what Roberts is up to now.
“Trouble the Water” isn’t just a gripping account of the 2005 storm and its aftermath. It’s also the story of a couple of self-described “hustlers” trying to reinvent themselves and straighten out their lives in the most difficult circumstances possible. The great luck of filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal was not just that they got access to Roberts’ storm footage, but that Roberts herself is such a compelling, compassionate bundle of energy.
The day before Katrina struck, Roberts shot footage of her neighborhood, “to show people we had a world,” as she put it. The Robertses and their friends, who didn’t have the resources to leave before the storm, ended up risking their lives to preserve fragments of that world. Trapped in the attic of their house with neighbors, they used a punching bag to ferry people to relative safety. After the storm, they led survivors to a local naval base, where they were turned away at gunpoint.
The resilience of this couple is amazing, and that’s the title of a track that Roberts, an aspiring hip-hop artist, wrote.
As compelling as the story of Roberts and her husband and friends is, “Trouble the Water” is also a searing and necessary reminder of what happened to New Orleans — and what continued to happen. Lessin and Deal punctuate the story of the storm and the Roberts’ odyssey with glimpses of local and national coverage of the bungled response to the disaster. At one point, the directors show footage of the neighborhoods devastated by the broken levees, as 911 calls are heard on the soundtrack.
No one is coming, callers are told by 911 operators. “So I’m gonna die?” a caller asks.
Roberts and her husband and friends didn’t die. And they were determined to remake their lives and, as Scott said, “do it right from the beginning.”
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“Trouble the Water” is an unforgettable portrait of their tenacity in the face of every possible obstacle.
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