Movie Critic: Blacks & the Poor Are in "Exile in America"
Convinced liberal film critic Manohla Dargis delivered a laudatory review of "Trouble the Water" in Monday's edition. It's a Katrina documentary made by filmmakers who worked with that well-known paragon of objectivity, Michael Moore, who Dargis loves as well.
Dargis wholly embraced the left-wing alienation put forward by the filmmakers:
A beautiful woman with a bashful smile and a swagger, Ms. Roberts is an extraordinarily vivid screen presence. She's a tremendous documentary subject, and if "Trouble the Water" simply tracked what this one gutsy 24-year-old endured as she and her husband and friends moved to higher ground and eventually out of Louisiana altogether, it would be enough to warrant your attention. But Ms. Lessin and Mr. Deal haven't cooked up yet another softheaded story about triumphant humanity; with the help of these New Orleans residents, they have made a powerful political argument, backed by evidence provided by the shaming indifference of the government, that to be poor and black in America is to be an exile in America.
