Robert Pine and Cornelius Smith Jr. as Drs. Horace Baltz and Bryant King in Five Days at Memorial (2022)
In late August 2005, two weeks after Hurricane Katrina had ravaged New Orleans, causing 1,800 deaths and over $120 billion worth of damage, a flustered President George W. Bush told journalists that Congress needed to “take a sober look at the decision-making that went on” in the early days of the disaster. Historians have since concluded that there had been very little decision-making, and several filmmakers, among them Spike Lee in his 2006 HBO documentary When the Levees Broke, have accused politicians of neglecting the city’s Black and working-class residents, who were often left – literally – to sink or swim.
Based on a 2013 book by journalist Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial revisits the awful aftermath of the disaster and casts a clinical eye on the disturbing, sometimes downright ghoulish events at New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center, whose staff seem at first to be heroes. The doctors and nurses work day and night, with no power and waning food supplies. Water is everywhere – falling from skies, streaming from eyes, flooding the basement, coursing down cheeks in the sweltering heat. But it’s morphine, administered by the seemingly diligent Anna Pou (Vera Farmiga), that does for many of the sick.
The first five episodes offer an infrastructural critique of Memorial – and, by implication, much of American healthcare. The hospital, it turns out, was built below sea level, had no plans for mass evacuation in the event of flooding, and is overseen by a remote, profit-motivated company. The final three episodes chart the efforts of two plain-speaking investigators (Michael Gaston and Molly Hager) not only to discover what compelled Pou to break the Hippocratic Oath but to bring her to justice. The narrative is interspersed with archival news footage that’s at least as powerful as the scripted drama.
For such a lengthy series, it’s surprising how cursorily writer-director duo John Ridley and Carlton Cuse treat themes such as race, religion and even money. Farmiga and Cherry Jones (playing a resource-challenged incident commander) do wonders in spite of being given dialogue that is little more than expository. Questions – what are the duties of doctors? – are raised without being adequately tackled. The most crucial question of all, concerning Pou’s guilt, is largely fudged.
Still, the most chilling detail comes at the end: by 2018, $14 billion had been spent on a network of levees and floodwalls to protect New Orleans from future flooding. Due to rising sea levels, it may need updating as early as 2023. Five Days at Memorial may be less a work of history than a premonition of horrors ahead.