Gateway Cinephiles

Trouble the Water
2008 (USA)
Directors: Tia Lessin and Carl Deal
Viewed: September 28, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

A - Directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal have achieved a triumph in documentary film-making with Trouble the Water, a phenomenal, searing portrait of American survival and spirit. The directors deserve a bow for offering veterans such as Errol Morris and Werner Herzog stiff competition for the best documentary feature of 2008. However, the soul and vision of Trouble the Water’s protagonist, one Kimberly Rivers Roberts, so suffuses—one might say possesses—the film, that any fair assessment must regard it as her film, at least in part. Indeed, Trouble the Water recalls Herzog’s own Grizzly Man in its near-surrender of its form and content to the sizzling force of its fascinating subject. Admittedly, Lessin and Deal’s stance towards Roberts is far warmer, more admiring, and more credulous than that of the German master towards Timothy Treadwell. There is a temptation to regard Trouble the Waters at least partly as “found art,” given that Roberts’ own amateur footage of the Lower Ninth Ward under Katrina’s lash serves as the film’s foundation. However, from this small seed springs a work so undeniably powerful that one can only praise the directors for revealing Trouble the Water’s glittering treasures for all the world to see.

The film begins at a Red Cross shelter in September 2005, where Kimberly and Scott Roberts introduce themselves to the directors as New Orleans natives and survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Kim reveals, enthusiastically and with knowing showmanship, that she has roughly half an hour of rare, first-hand footage of the storm’s devastation, captured on a handheld camcorder. Trouble the Water weaves Kim’s astonishing, grainy glimpses of a drowning city with Lessin and Deal’s own footage as they follow the Roberts’ journey back to the Lower Ninth, then to relatives in Memphis, and then back again to New Orleans to try to rebuild their lives. The simplicity of the story is the film’s appeal and also its grand illusion, for Trouble the Water deals with both the ugly reality of Katrina and the hopefulness that defies that reality. The indictment it presents is unambiguous: America’s leaders left hundreds of thousands of poor citizens to die like Dark Age peasants in the face of a natural disaster. However, this scathing (yet persuasive) critique is not the heart of the film, but merely the starting point for Kim and Scott’s tale of remarkable fortitude.

Kim is an inescapable presence in the film, perpetually behind the camera or in front of it. An aspiring hip-hop artist and a bit of a hustler, Kim serves as a tuning fork for Trouble the Water. She vibrates to her own pitch, and the film can only follow along and find the harmony. To say that the strength of the film lies in her authenticity—her blackness? femininity? poverty?—is woefully off the mark. It is obvious from the moment we meet her that the Kim is not a pristine anthropological specimen meant to embody the Big Easy’s plight. She is shamelessly, joyously, fiercely involved in the film. At different points throughout Trouble the Water, she serves as an interviewer, interpreter, guide, narrator, journalist, performer, cinematographer, and counselor, not to mention a proxy for our own shame and frustrations.

I asked myself, “Where did they find this woman?” before I remembered that, no, she found them. Scrappy, graceful self-promoter that she is, Kim evinces a compelling appreciation for the drama of her own story even as it is unfolding, a drama that runs deeper than mere gaping at disaster. She wanders through her neighborhood prior to landfall and interrogates friends and strangers about their plans for riding out the storm. She breathlessly repeats the date and that dread name—”Katrina”—well before the extent of the hurricane’s calamitous reach is apparent, as if she knows that the storm will be talked about for generations to come. She speaks earnestly and awestruck about the strength of her community and how hardships bring people together. She sculpts the sorrows of New Orleans into her own life story, rapping to the camera over a track about her unlikely survival and boundless strength.

Rippling through Trouble the Water is the seductive and emotionally overwhelming notion that Kimberly Roberts is the quintessential face of twenty-first century America. Here is a woman who is powerful, courageous, scarred, dauntless, spiritual, sentimental, media-savvy, and self-aware. She is a woman longing to simultaneously start over and find her way home. This, not Trouble the Water’s peppering of justifiable liberal rage, is what makes it so engaging. Which isn’t to say the the film’s gestures towards the indignant polemic sub-genre are ineffective. Lessin has served as a producer for a sizable slice of Michael Moore’s output, but his influence is only apparent in the film’s bemused, profoundly bitter awareness of the apathy infecting America’s ruling class. In contrast to Moore’s winking camera-hunger, here the directors only rarely intrude on Trouble the Water in any overt manner.

Lessin and Deal largely permit Kim and Scott to tell their tale, resisting the urge to editorialize or file down the serrated edges of their protagonists. The directors coax out the couple’s complexity—a fabulous, human complexity, absent any sort of haughty exceptionalism—so smoothly, with such alert eyes and ears, that it seems effortless. (The bits of ironic news footage spliced in here and there suggest a clumsier hand.) Indeed, while the narrative thrust is unmistakably Kim’s, Lessin and Deal leave their mark on the film, often in the way they cunningly convey revealing details. The cherubic Scott carries a deep scar on his left cheek, and I idly wondered: Would its origin ever be explained? Then, near the film’s conclusion, Kim explains her husband’s wound in her own way, dropping an oblique line into one of her songs that sheds fresh light on the couple’s relationship. That moment, and the confessional character to it, is Kim’s, but its placement in the film is a testament to Lessin and Deal’s marvelous storytelling instincts.

Rarely do socially conscious documentaries about recent events rise above the shackles of outrage, and rarely do they have a purpose beyond motivating already sympathetic viewers to political action. Trouble the Water will persist, I believe, as a work of documentary art that transcends its proximal subject matter. It stands as an essential primary and secondary source in the history of American life, and also as an affecting glimpse of human resilience, one that is both uncommonly noble and strangely familiar. Kim and Scott, despite all the mistakes and tribulations in their lives, represent what we aspire to be, the kind of people we were always told America was made of: the people who start swimming when the waters start rising.

I Served the King of England
2006 (Czech Republic / Slovakia)
Director: Jirí Menzel
Viewed: September 23, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

B - Jirí Menzel’s I Served the King of England boasts an undeniably mischievous, gloriously giddy tone. Flashes of the grotesque and wearisome melodrama lurk in its corners, but on the whole it is a winsome film, and eagerly so. Its genre-tripping acrobatic feats—twists and twirls of fable, slapstick, satire, tragedy, and World War II epic—certainly set it apart from any other film I’ve seen this year. What elevates Served above an amusing novelty for its own sake is Menzel’s ambition to craft both an engaging character study of lingering adolescence and a penetrating allegory about twentieth-century Europe (and you don’t need to be a critic or a historian to discern how these are related.) This ambition lurks just beneath the film’s pleasurable, often schizophrenic surface, defying the instinct to dismiss Served as a quirky diversion. To be sure, the film holds shortcomings that cannot be dismissed, particularly the trite, manipulative turns in the story and some woefully dull patches in a work otherwise so filled with motion and delight. However, these are small potatoes alongside the film’s sensual joys, its unexpected thoughtfulness, and the lead performance by Ivan Barnev, who guides us on a rapturous and insightful comic journey.

Served begins with the release of diminutive Jan Díte (Oldrich Kaiser) from a Communist prison in 1960s Czechoslovakia. Paroled to build gravel roads in the Bohemian wilds, Jan reminisces about the meandering path his life has taken, in between pining for the young, flirtatious Marcela (Zuzana Fialová), another ex-convict released to work for the state. In flashback, we witness Jan’s life spent serving at the feet of the wealthy, as well as his unquenchable passion to one day be a millionaire himself. In the pubs, brothels, and four-star hotels of 1920s and 30s Prague, a young Jan (Barnev) waits on the Czech elite, always walking a tightrope between ambition and monkey business. Crisp perfection establishes his reputation, but it is his impish character that wins him friends and allies. He is fascinated by the power that money has over people, and he marvels at the childlike happiness of the supremely wealthy. He tosses handfuls of coins to watch Czech tycoons scramble for them, and, following the example of genial meat-slicer salesman Mr. Walden (Marián Labuda), he meticulously lays out his paper currency and basks in it. Women hold a comparable wonder for Jan, and he pursues them with zeal and adoration.

Jan is not so much swept along by history as he deftly rides it like a keen-eyed surfer, always on the lookout for trouble and openings. The rise of National Socialism complicates his endeavors, as his fellow Czechs shun and scorn the ethnic Germans in their midst. This includes Líza (Julia Jentsch), a Rhineland beauty as deficient in stature as Jan. Despite her disturbing fetishism for der Fuehrer, something about her undisguised devotion to Jan—as a partner, rather than an object of pity or sport—sparks real love in the little waiter. Then the march of the Nazi war machine turns the tables in Prague, and the Czechs are suddenly second-class citizens. Jan attempts the delicate waltz expected of pliant Slavic subjects of the Reich, all the while working towards his dreamy future as a wealthy hotelier.

Menzel leaps back and forth between these flashbacks and Jan’s reflections in the gray post-war present, a time enlivened only by the prospects of an erotic tumble with Marcela. In theory, the use of these twin storylines makes sense, structurally speaking, but Menzel loses his way somewhat in the latter-day sequences, getting bogged down in rambling musings and alleged tensions far less intriguing than those of Jan’s past adventures. Still, Kaiser’s handsome Czech countenance and the combined mirth and sadness in his eyes command our attention, while the dreary, almost medieval quality to Communist Czechoslovakia serves its purpose in contrasting with the glittering opulence of the pre-war era. In truth, Menzel positively revels in the decadence of a vanished Prague, luxuriating in its food, drink, women, and aristocratic excess. At times, Served takes on the surreal, tableau qualities of a Gilliam feature, as when Jan serves milk to a gaggle of nude Teutonic beauties at a Reich “breeding facility,” or when pudgy Czech diplomats dance is ecstasy while dining on roasted camel.

There is a cartoonish quality to the characters that populate Served, and especially to Jan himself, that lends them a vividness and also an unfortunate distance. The film’s preference for caricature over authentic characterization curtails the possibilities for empathy and for a sense of true peril. When events turn tragic, the effect is ultimately coercive or even outright cheap. Fortunately, Menzel finds ways to charm us with his players and convey the striking qualities of their various social plights. Barnev in particular holds much of the film’s weight on his slim shoulders, discovering Jan’s inner tribulations with clarity and affection. A curious hobgoblin winding his way through an epoch of possibility and ruin, Jan nurtures his obsessions, even as the tumultuous events around him reveal flashes of his hidden compassion, vulnerability, and bitterness. Gleeful and grasping, Jan is easily dazzled and not above blockhead risks. He is painfully aware of his place in the order of things, but also oddly oblivious to the more abstract motives of others. Rarely has the phrase “man-child” seemed more appropriate.

Menzel also gracefully conveys a symbolic dimension to Jan’s character, one reflective of a forgotten stripe of twentieth century European life. Not so much opportunistic as naive and diligent, Jane rides out the blackest years of human history on fortitude, canniness, and sheer luck. Despite the stigma of Nazism in Prague during the early years of the war, he aligns himself with its trappings out of affection for Líza. Under occupation, he reaps the benefits of this early loyalty, but he doesn’t seem pleased or ashamed with himself, just bewildered. For all of Served’s cartoon silliness, the director exhibits little patience for Good Guy / Bad Guy dualities. Nearly every character that Jan stumbles across reveals a capacity for both brutality and gentleness, honor and cravenness, vanity and selflessness. Menzel’s achievement lies in the way that this ambiguity never seems contrived. Through a lens of comic book folly, he shows us that ambiguity is always there, the ugly secret of a history too often writ as stark morality play. Most pointedly, Served suggests that time is rarely kind to either aspirants or survivors in the end, and that escaping with one’s skin is often the best that one can hope for in a world battered by shifting and violent ideologies.