Harrowing, infuriating yet remarkably even-handed, “Five Days at Memorial” is one of the most humane docudramas ever produced. Even as it depicts a nonstop horror show.
This unusual combination rises organically from the limited series’ terrible subject, the 2005 flooding of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The specific, withering focus here is on the city’s Memorial Hospital, where some 2,000 patients, staff, visitors, area residents and their pets rode out the storm, only to get trapped without electricity, with dwindling supplies and in blistering heat for days after the levees broke. A week following the facility’s final, rushed evacuation, 45 corpses were found inside. And not all of them had succumbed to their illnesses or the terrible conditions.
Beginning Friday, Aug. 12, on Apple TV+, the eight-episode series was adapted by Carlton Cuse (“Lost,” “Locke & Key”) and the Oscar-winning “12 Years a Slave” screenwriter John Ridley from Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter (and doctor) Sheri Fink’s nonfiction bestseller. The two showrunners and Wendey Stanzler split directing duties, but maintained a consistent sense of physical and moral purgatory that strives for objectivity. Judgment isn’t entirely absent; there’s too much malfeasance to avoid it. But outrage is always cut with the notion that placing blame is a business as muddy as the rising Lake Pontchartrain waters.
而大,能够体现heroic, craven and tragic facets of the disaster, controlled performances by Vera Farmiga and Cherry Jones set the show’s tone of rational competence fighting a losing battle against madness.
Farmiga is Dr. Anna Pou, a gifted, second-generation cancer surgeon who’s pragmatic and prays, her can-do demeanor leavened by a heartfelt bedside manner. If she has a fatal flaw, it’s her compassionate commitment to ameliorating the misery of patients she can’t save.
Jones plays director of nursing Susan Mulderick, the designated incident commander for Katrina who quickly discovers the corporation that owns the hospital, Tenet, has no protocols for a calamity of this kind. Winging it from moment to moment, crisis to crisis, Mulderick does her best to maintain a facade of optimism as she manages deteriorating circumstances and combative administrators, while also high-hatting the staff and patients from Life Care, a medical operation run by a different company that occupies a floor of the Memorial building.
The Life Care situation doubles as a metaphor for the slow Katrina response’s overall inequity, which left many of New Orleans’ poorer and Black residents out to dry and die. More direct commentary on the racial politics of disaster is provided by Cornelius Smith Jr.’s Dr. Bryant King, a recent Memorial hire and apparently the sole African American doctor, who genuinely wants everybody helped but sees increasing discrimination in how resources are allocated.
Michael Gaston is outstanding in later episodes as dogged but soulful Butch Schaefer, a good ol’ boy investigator for Louisiana’s attorney general. His drawl is a thing of regional beauty, as is the range of authentic Bayou State accents heard throughout the show.
Makeup and costume departments do exemplary jobs of drenching the Memorial folks in sweat (and often, tears). Props to the actors for not giving a damn how they look, or appear to smell. It ain’t pretty, but it’s art in the service of uncomfortable truth.
Does “Five Days at Memorial” get to the bottom of what really happened, though? The show leaves it up to the viewer to decide. Who’s guilty and of what — murder? being human? — isn’t so much left ambiguous as attributed to the mystery of how our different minds work. That’s not conventionally satisfying when widespread government, corporate and individual mishandling led to so much death and destruction. But it may be the most honest answer to why people do what they do when the levee breaks.
M“Five Days at Memorial”:Limited series. Starring Vera Farmiga, Cherry Jones, Michael Gaston and Cornelius Smith Jr. Developed by Carlton Cuse and John Ridley. (TV-MA. Eight approximately hour-long episodes.) First three episodes available to stream on Apple TV+ starting Friday, Aug. 12. Subsequent episodes released Fridays through Sept. 16.