“If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise” is Spike Lee’s long awaited follow-up to the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning “When the Levees Broke: a Requiem in Four Acts”… he was shooting this new documentary on the aftermath and recovery of New Orleans…then something happened along the way…
Five years after Katrina devastated one of the last of the steadfast original and cultural centers of this nation, that is New Orleans, Spike Lee returns to the Big Easy, first to document and to observe first-hand her attempted ‘rise from the ashes’. Then in the midst of shooting, the region experiences another violent blow with the BP Oil Catastrophe or as some folks call it the ‘Oil Spill’. While devastating and shattering as this documentary is, it is also a tribute to the citizens of New Orleans, to their resilience, their faith, to their love of this place they still call home. Yet as a viewer- and a lover of NOLA, I just shake my head, wipe my tears and wonder, just how much do these people have to endure, just how much more can anyone take down there?
An opus, like a larger-than-life jazz opera, this work rifts and segues continually in its four hours, divided over two nights, as we touch down upon some truly good things like the Saints victory at the 2010 Super Bowl, the series of legal victories that demanded accountability for many of the displaced, Brad Pitt and his housing development in the Lower Ninth Ward. The city was coming back despite successes and failures in healthcare, education, housing, economic growth and a surge in crime that started with the hurricane and never ceased. Then in February of this year, the earthquake hit Haiti in its bowels and Port-au-Prince, the sister city of NOLA was devastated; perhaps this should have given us an inkling, an intuition that more was to come.
Because it did on April 20th - and New Orleans and its environs have now been delivered another mammoth obstacle to recovery, at that moment when the British Petroleum off-shore oil rig exploded and erupted, spilling, no - gushing endless amounts of oil into the Gulf producing the largest man-made disaster this country has ever known. This on top of the fact that they truly had never recovered from Katrina, not really. Not even close. Not with so many of its citizens who’ve never been able to come home, because their neighborhoods and homes are simply gone, or they simply can’t afford to live there anymore.
Lee faces us with the truth, the truth of our times. The truth that in the wealthiest, most advanced country in the world, we don’t take care of our own. Nor do we make those accountable for their acts, be it the Bush Administration’s careless disregard for a city with one of the largest diverse populations or a multinational corporation like BP who doesn’t take proper precautions to care for a fragile and complex environment such New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta, let alone the eco-system of the entire Gulf region.
What is most honorable about this work is that Spike Lee does give voice to all sides – more than 300 hundred voices here, including as C. Ray Nagin, Mitch Landrieu – former and current mayors of the city, celebs like Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, Anderson Cooper and Wendell Pearce, former governor Kathleen Blanco, former FEMA director Michael Brown, and many ordinary, decent citizens hanging onto a thread of hope, or of what? A fantasy they’ll someday get their life back? Or something better. I mean don’t we, as human beings, all hope for that?
Like these voices or not, agree with them or not, the one thing uniting all them all is a love of this city and a desire to see her come back. Will she?
Only if God is willing… and da creek don’t rise…
“If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise” premieres Monday and Tuesday, August 23rd and 24th on HBO and can be seen following on OnDemand.
HBO Documentary Films and 40 Acres and a Mule present a Spike Lee Joint; produced by Sam Pollard and Spike Lee; directed by Spike Lee; supervising producer for HBO is Jacqueline Glover; executive producer for HBO is Sheila Nevins.
Rated TV14 for Adult Content and Adult Language.
2 x 2 hours.
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