SUNDAY, AUGUST 22, 2010
KLMNO
BD
E5 ‘If God Is Willing’ storms through New Orleans tv previewfrom E1
Part of the city’s story is a power- ful sense of overindulgence, reck- less abandon and often mindless devotion to its unique identity and traditions. “At the end of the day, we’ve got to realize it’s a football game,” ob- serves Jacques Morial, a commu- nity organizer and part of a local political family. Historian Doug- las Brinkley, one of dozens of Lee’s interview subjects, goes that idea one better, linking the boisterousness and boosterism of “Who dat?” to a curious “inferi- ority complex.” Is it possible that New Orleans is too in love with it- self to fix itself?
That’s only one of the deeper angles explored here. Before it’s done, “If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise” describes no fewer than a dozen lingering (en- demic, really) crises that Katrina merely exacerbated, including: New Orleanians’ terrible eating habits, which lead to poor health- care options, which lead to the forlorn Charity Hospital, which is still fenced off after five years, while the city attempts to raze a couple of hundred acres of old neighborhoods to build a new hospital complex.
And there are still housing is- sues of every kind, as poorer resi- dents resent the state and federal government efforts to replace the New Deal-era and Great Society- era projects with mixed-income housing (still largely unbuilt); the displaced list their lingering symptoms associated with form- aldehyde exposure from living in FEMA’s toxic trailers. Some evac- uees never came back; others came back and suffered a host of mental illnesses, just in time for the state to close the only in- patient psychiatric facility in town.
But it’s worse. There are the
struggling schools and the resi- dents’ resistance to reform. There is the crime, the police corrup- tion, the coverups. There is the intricate fabric of racism that in- forms the place. There are the levees. Lee remains transfixed by the Army Corps of Engineers’ fail- ures in the levee construction de- partment, which brought on the flood. New Orleanians remain immobile on this point: Katrina did not cause the floods is a man- tra, while New Orleans is below sea level seems an irrelevant bit of trivia. Lee slowly connects many dis-
parate dots into a near-perfect tone poem about American dys- function. For all the attention New Orleans’s woes have re- ceived, it is still drenched and moldered in a feeling of aban- donment and every flavor of ex- asperation. It is our heaven and
For all the attention New Orleans’s woes have received, it is still drenched and moldered in a feeling of
abandonment and every flavor of exasperation.
our hell. “We’re not really part of the United States,” Garland Rob- inette, a longtime local newsman, tells Lee. “We’re like a rich Haiti.” Lee’s work here rivals that of
filmmaking’s finest documentar- ians; he keeps the anger that has defined his scripted features mostly in check, letting people and situations speak for them- selves. (Though I continue to re- main unmoved by the passion of spoken-word poetry, which Lee uses to excess, and I suspect I’m not alone.) He returns to some of the original storm survivors and evacuees profiled in “When the Levees Broke,” nearly all of whom look older than they are. Time has healed them, in a few cases, but it’s also been unkind. Nearly everyone gets a say here, including humbled players like former mayor C. Ray Nagin and former FEMA director Mi- chael “Heckuva Job” Brown, who says he never fully understood the administrative missteps of the Katrina response until he read a long dissection of the dis- aster in Vanity Fair. It’s a true act of journalistic wonder that Spike Lee can make an after-Katrina film in which Brownie, of all peo- ple, can convey the pain of per- manent failure. By the time “If God Is Willing
. . .” is over, everyone is to blame for the condition of New Orleans, starting with New Orleans itself (and its myriad injustices) and eventually fanning outward to state and federal government. The Bush administration is still to blame, and now so is the Oba- ma administration, with its ten- tative approach to the BP oil spill. This blame eventually fans out to you, the non-New Orleanian HBO subscriber, who simply will never get the culture of the place
— including those of us who stuck through the lackluster mid- dle episodes of HBO’s “Treme.”
Then comes the BP spill, with
that inexorably gushing spillcam, which pushes both Lee and his film over the edge. Here, it’s the same Katrina-esque problem all over again, in which lack of feder- al oversight and basic greed tri- umphed over all else, destroying environment and wounding the culture. Though it’s a tidy book- end to the Katrina story, it all feels a little too soon for the spill to work as a denouement. Never- theless, Lee focuses on irrepara- ble ruin at the hands of BP, the scope of which is still largely un- known. Yet it does all go together,
doesn’t it? Describing her feel- ings about the BP spill and the use of chemical dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico, Tracie L. Washington of the Louisiana Jus- tice Institute makes the docu- mentary’s most apt analogy, in that the past five years have felt like being doused by one dis- persant after another — housing dispersed, schools dispersed, hospitals dispersed, people dis- persed. “My point is stop spray- ing us with these [symbolic] dis- persants,” she says. “There is no magic elixir to the man-made problems we have in Louisiana. Don’t ’sperse me, bro.” So how to “fix” New Orleans? Like most documentaries, “If
God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise” absolves itself of pre- scriptives. Watching it, a tax- averse viewer might conclude that the only answer to New Or- leans’s problems rests in moun- tains of imaginary state and fed- eral cash to support its poorest residents with the full comple- ment of social services — a life- time of affordable housing, health care, education, employ- ment assistance, transportation and of course, 100 percent hurri- cane protection. But at the same time, New Or- leans asserts its need to be left alone, to be uniquely itself. Lee finishes with a “Who dat?” re- prise. After four hours of lament, the jubilation becomes somehow hollow, as the people of New Or- leans dance off into what feels like permanent oblivion.
stueverh@washpost.com
If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise
(two parts; two hours each) airs Monday and Tuesday at 9 p.m. on HBO.
VIDEO ON THE WEBWatch a clip from “If God Is Willing and
Da Creek Don’t Rise” at
washingtonpost.com/style.
KING HONEY SIRLOIN
STEAKS USDA CHOICE MEMORABILIA
Collectors willing to pay a lot for a piece of Hollywood history ‘Lost’ props and
costumes up for auction this weekend
by Sandy Cohen
los angeles — Marilyn Mon- roe’s chest X-rays. Barbra Strei- sand’s houndstooth cap from the film “What’s Up, Doc?” Elvis Pres- ley’s empty prescription bottles. Alfred Hitchcock’s driver’s license. Who wants this stuff? And why would they pay thousands of dol- lars for it? Hollywood memorabilia auc- tions have become big business around the globe, with a seeming- ly endless supply of celebrity relics — and collectors who will pay big bucks for them. In what’s become almost routine around town, hun- dreds more items are up for sale this weekend, when props and costumes from TV’s “Lost” hit the auction block. “This market is fun, because it’s probably the most accessible mar- ket that’s sold at auction today,” said appraiser Laura Woolley. “You don’t need to have a huge history of connoisseurship to get the vis- ceral reaction to the ruby slip- pers [from “The Wizard of Oz”], and you don’t need to be told why they’re im- portant. These pieces just have an instant connection with people.” For collector
David Davis, it
all started with Streisand’s houndstooth cap. Davis heard on the “Today” show that the wool cap she wore in the 1972 comedy was going up for auction a few years ago, and on a whim, he called and placed a bid. “I thought I could never pos-
sibly afford or win something that Barbra Streisand wore in a movie,” he said. “I thought it was out of my league.” But his bid won the cap. Five years later, his collection in- cludes several Streisand costumes, along with some worn by Cher, Carol Burnett and Paul McCart- ney. “What keeps this industry alive are the fans who love this stuff,” said Darren Julien of Julien’s Auc- tions, which specializes in celeb- rity memorabilia (and famously sold Michael Jackson’s bejeweled glove for $420,000 to a buyer from Hong Kong last year). “Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Cafe popularized the idea of what memorabilia was,” said Jo- seph Maddalena, president and
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owner of Profiles in History, which is administering the “Lost” auc- tion in Santa Monica. “It’s the same exact thing as what you’d do with a van Gogh: You buy it, hang it on the wall and look at it.” Other collectors see themselves
as custodians of history. Scott Fortner has been collecting Mari- lyn Monroe books and photos since he was a kid. One of those books was an auction catalogue, and it inspired him to place bids and start buying Monroe’s cos- tumes, clothing and keepsakes. Fortner doesn’t display the
items at home, because they’re fra- gile and sensitive to light. But he has lent his vast collection to mu- seums, including the Hollywood Museum for an exhibition that closes Aug. 31. None of the collectors inter-
MAGIC SHOES:
The ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz.”
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY
viewed for this story saw their pur- chases as financial investments. Though Julien tells a story of a Mi- chael Jackson fan who bought one of the pop star’s jackets for $4,000 in 1989 and sold it this year for $271,000, auction experts agree that collecting celebrity memora- bilia is more for the fun than for the money. “You can’t look at any of this stuff as an investment,” said Kathleen Guzman, a long- time auctioneer and ap- praiser who works for “Antiques Roadshow.” “These are senti- mental purchases that may or may not retain their value in the long term.” —Associated Press
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DAVID LEE/HBO VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
‘WHO DAT’: Phyllis Montana-Leblanc shows her team’s colors in a scene from Spike Lee’s gripping and sprawling documentary about life in New Orleans five years after Hurricane Katrina.
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