Critic wrangle: "Trouble the Water."

Friday, August 22, 2008 | 4:25 PM

Another Sundance film, this one the winner of the Grand Jury Prize, also hits theaters today -- Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's documentary about New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina, "Trouble the Water," uses footage shot by Lower Ninth Ward resident Kimberly Robert to chronicle the devastation of the storm. And reviews would indicate it does so aptly: Jim Ridley, writing at the Village Voice, calls it "history captured in the visual grammar of Cloverfield," and adds that "[t]he resilience of the movie's subjects--survivors of street crime and drugs and HIV--irradiates Trouble the Water like sunshine." Manohla Dargis at the New York Times finds that the filmmakers "have created an ingeniously fluid narrative structure that, when combined with Ms. Roberts's visuals, news material and their own original 16-millimeter film footage, ebbs and flows like great drama."

"In many ways, I think Kim Roberts' authorship, not just of her amazing storm footage or her music but of her life, is the true subject of 'Trouble the Water,'" suggests an impassioned Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. "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." "In one scene," writes New York's David Edelstein, "Kimberly and fellow refugees line up for FEMA assistance at some kind of ranch, where a sign overhead points to Gate B--CATTLE ENTRANCE. You can't make this stuff up. You can, however, capture it on film for all time. Trouble the Water is ineradicably moving."

For Nick Schager at Slant, "The directors' unwavering concentration on their two subjects' plight simultaneously brings the calamity down to a human scale and, consequently, enhances the depth of the tragedy. It also, however, allows for an artless depiction of sacrifice, compassion, altruism, and hope amid misfortune." Noel Murray at the Onion AV Club, however, allows that "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," while Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE believes that the "thankfully infrequent miscalculations" of newscast clips featuring FEMA director Mike Brown and George W. Bush are balanced by "revealing moments and painfully experienced truths."

[Photo: "Trouble the Water," Zeitgeist Films, 2008]