Is he doing the right thing?

On Oct. 12, 2005, Spike Lee stopped by the CNN studios in New York to tout his new autobiography, "That's My Story and I'm Sticking to It." But the on-air conversation quickly turned to something he was much more passionate about - Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans in late August.

So, the anchor casually asked, tell us about this new documentary you're going to make for HBO called "When the Levees Broke." Lee was happy to oblige. The situation in the Lower Ninth Ward, he explained, was "the same thing" as the Roman Polanski classic "Chinatown," where there was a conspiracy to blow up the dam to flood the L.A. basin. "Look, we got a bunch of poor black people here [in the Ninth Ward] .We got to save these other neighborhoods. What we got to do? Dump this [water] in this ward. BOOM! I believe it."

Maybe sensing he'd gone too far, Lee hastily said "No, no, no, no, no," his film about the flooding of New Orleans would not embrace the conspiracy theory of the moment, that the U.S. government dynamited the levees to save the houses of rich white people and displace the black. (He had espoused this theory in several other interviews, too.) Nevertheless, some viewers might have taken a sharp breath at that very moment: The most influential black filmmaker in history is about to make a horrific situation even worse.

Powerful, but scattershot

And now, to those viewers - not to mention the non-fans who see Lee as a provocateur, or worse, a troublemaker with an apocalyptic view of race relations in the United States - some words of reassurance. "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" - which debuted last Wednesday before an audience of 12,000 at the New Orleans Arena and appears on HBO Monday and Tuesday nights at 9 (it also will be shown in its entirety on Aug. 29, the one-year anniversary of Katrina's landfall) - is powerful, thoughtful and deeply compassionate.

That said, "Levees" is often scattershot and undisciplined; this can be vacuum-cleaner filmmaking with a willingness to suck up everything, then cursively address each issue, topic and controversy (even global warming) that raged around one of the great tragedies in modern American history. By servicing all things, no one thing is adequately explored.

Nor is "Levees" always a pure "documentary" - though this word will have to do - it's also agitprop. One senses that Lee would have dearly loved to cast this story in a heroes/ villains mold. But the complexity of the narrative, not to mention the facts, overwhelms that impulse at every turn. Yes, the Bush administration's response - in particular, the response of much-maligned Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown - is viewed as incompetent and almost criminally negligent. That, however, was brutally, and visibly, established at the time for the entire world to see.

A "paranoid" mayor?

Other quibbles: Mayor Ray Nagin is interviewed at length but never asked about the sensational charges raised in historian Douglas Brinkley's 2006 book on the flood, "The Great Deluge." In this richly - and presumably carefully - reported history, Nagin is portrayed as a preening paranoid who hides in a hotel room, oblivious to the tragedy around him. In "Levees," he is cool, calm and collected, a voice of passion and reason at the center of the real and proverbial storm.

There are also a handful of blessedly brief interviews with "celebrities" and other notables - the Rev. Al Sharpton, Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, Kanye West and so on. But their presence is usually the equivalent of fingernails dragging across the chalkboard. When Belafonte starts chatting about a meeting he had with Venezuela president Hugo Chavez "to discuss what he could do to help and while we were at it, to see what he could do to help other needy black people in the United States," you can almost feel "Levees" sag to the point of rupture. West has a deer-in-the-headlights stare when asked about his controversial "Bush doesn't care about black people" remark made during a Katrina charity telethon - the one that got so much outraged press at the time. Here, he has nothing else to contribute.

Giving voice to victims

Produced with Lee's longtime editor, Samuel Pollard - his collaborator on HBO's acclaimed 1996 documentary, "4 Little Girls," about the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Ala. - "Levee" soars when the cameras turn to those who were so tragically displaced. Many are poor. Most are black. All are people you've probably never heard of and will probably never hear of again. They are - this is a much abbreviated list - people like Calvin Mackie, Will Chittenden, Michael Selig, Cindy Morgan, Donald Harrison, Herbert Freeman Jr., Joseph Melancon or Fred Johnson. The veteran actor and New Orleans native Wendell Pierce ("The Wire's" Det. William "Bunk" Moreland) is also interviewed at length (at one point discussing the plight of his elderly father).

Lee's approach seems almost Whitmanesque in its breadth and ambition: At moments, the idea seems to be that if you talk to as many people as possible who address as many issues as four hours will allow (insurance, food, looting, the Coast Guard, crime, and on and on), then the full scope of the tragedy will emerge. In fact, viewers may not necessarily come away with a full or even nuanced understanding of those issues, but they will come away with a nuanced grasp of the volcanic feelings that are catalyzed.

In the first act, the displaced - "evacuees" is now the preferred vernacular - are first debriefed by an off-screen Lee (there is no narration, and his voice is heard, at most, twice during these four hours). They seem stoic, resigned, almost as calm as if they're discussing an overdue utility bill. By the fourth act, they are raging - against the "system," FEMA, the injustice of their plight and the futility of their future.

One woman in particular, Phyllis Montana-Leblanc, speaks of the weather after the levee broke - "hot,very hot .... It was Africa heat. When people say, 'Go back to Africa,' HELL no!" - and by the fourth act, she recalls how she contemplated suicide. Jazz musician Terence Blanchard, who composed "Levees'" score, is also interviewed, while he later joins his weeping mother on a tour of her demolished home.

Silence is golden

And yet the most powerful moments emerge when no words are spoken. A spare, bleak piano dirge is scored over photo stills of bloated corpses rotting on the sidewalk. There are shots of ruined homes, lives, and of a ruined city. A bereft mother. Kimberly Polk, is inconsolable at the funeral for her 5-year-old daughter, Sarena, who drowned in the flood. This is where the word "requiem" feels particularly appropriate to this broadcast; other devastated towns and cities from Pass Christian to Pascagoula in Mississippi will be rebuilt. But some will be left with a forlorn sense after watching "Levees" that the Ninth Ward and even the soul of New Orleans is lost forever.

Nevertheless, when Lee attended the TV critics' press tour in Pasadena, Calif., in mid-July, he declared that he was "amazed" by the spirit of the people of New Orleans.

"We know that there are people that aren't coming back, but the majority of them are going to stick it out. We interviewed so many people who said, 'I was born here, and I'm going to die here,' and they mean that."

He told reporters a lot of other things - "as Americans, our attention span is very quick, and we're off to the next thing ... . Many people have Katrina fatigue." Or this: He wanted this project at HBO because "when people are mad, they curse, they're profane, and I didn't want to censor anything these people had to say."

And, of course, he was asked about the bombing of the levees, his pet theory in fall 2005. "We touch on it," a chastened Lee admitted. "We felt we had to give credence to the many individuals, many of them African-American, who think the government had something to do with that."

Then, this afterthought: "I know it might be hard for you to understand, but if you're African-American, you don't put anything past the United States government."

After watching these four hours, maybe it's not so hard to understand or to feel the anger, hostility and futility that remains one year later.