Flakes and the future of films set in New Orleans

I saw the movie Flakes at SXSW this week. I was hoping for something good from Michael Lehmann, who directed Heathers back in the late 1980s. Then I found out that the movie was set (and probably shot) in New Orleans, and you couldn’t keep me away. Unfortunately, I was disappointed on several levels, especially as someone who grew up in the greater New Orleans area.
Flakes is a romantic comedy set around a “cereal bar” — like a coffeehouse, but serving bowls of cereal and milk. A rundown cereal bar on the edge of the Quarter is owned by Willie (Christopher Lloyd) and run by Neal (Aaron Stanford). However, Neal’s girlfriend Pussy Katz (Zooey Deschanel) wants Neal to take a week off and finish that great album he’s been working on, so he can send out the CD and sell it and become a successful musician and help fulfill their lifelong dream of living in a trailer.
Wait a second. Here is a movie set in New Orleans and someone has a lifelong dream of living in a trailer? Considering all the people who have lost their homes and are living in FEMA trailers, and the people who are actually about to be evicted from even those trailers and live who-knows-where, this seems to be in dubious taste.

An entrepreneur opens a sterile, corporate-ized rival cereal bar across the street from Flakes, and the two compete for customers. Neal remarks that they should just let the rival have all the tourist trade, because people in the Quarter can’t stand tourists and they’re lousy tippers anyway. Except — I don’t know a soul in the New Orleans area right now who isn’t happy to have the tourism trade back again, even if the tourists act annoying, because the city desperately needs the money.
Here’s the problem: Flakes was shot in New Orleans just before Katrina hit and the levees broke and big chunks of the city flooded and were swept away and most of the population had to leave town. If I had watched Flakes five years ago, I would have reviewed it as a quirky romantic comedy and I would have been pleased that it was shot in New Orleans, although I’ll never understand why most filmmakers think that the French Quarter area is the only part of New Orleans that exists. I would still have thought that the characters seemed privileged, that Pussy Katz is way too heavy-handed and shrewish (and downright cruel to Willie and his business in her schemes to have it closed down so Neal will be forced to focus on his music career), but it would have been just another indie comedy set in New Orleans, and the more filming in New Orleans the better.
Unfortunately, for me this movie does not work at all post-Katrina. The filmmakers chose to handle the problem of having pre-K footage in a post-K world by simply ignoring it. And admittedly, you have to wonder exactly how much they could do after a certain point. It would have been prohibitively expensive if not impossible to reshoot (although they shot in areas of New Orleans that were relatively undamaged … maybe those Hollywood folks are onto something by limiting their NOLA shooting to the Quarter). They could have edited out the tourist-bashing, but that’s about it. I can’t imagine that such a low-budget picture would have been able to rewrite and reshoot around the trailer thing.
And even if the trailer wasn’t in the movie, that still doesn’t change the pre-K attitude of the characters. Would the people in the cereal bar really sit around and not talk about rebuilding, Ray Nagin, the federal government, the Lower Ninth, and so forth? The main characters, Neal and Pussy Katz, might have seemed self-centered and a little privileged in a pre-K movie, but in a post-K movie, the way in which they act is downright obnoxious. And that’s assuming that these characters would even be able to afford to live in New Orleans, and would choose to do so, after Katrina — my guess is that they’d move to Austin or some other hip town with a lower crime rate and cheaper cost of living.
Again, Flakes was a victim of terrible timing; it’s not the filmmakers’ fault. And if you can somehow get your mind in a place where you can ignore Katrina’s effects yourself, the location shooting is lovely and someone did get the details right. No one has a silly Cajun accent, the French Market looks right, and there might be a rundown cereal bar over on Frenchman with a little courtyard adjacent to it, although in real life I would bet the cereal bar would be closer to the Quarter proper to draw those tourists. Finally, there’s a marvelous performance by New Orleans actor John McConnell (aka that guy who played Ignatius onstage) as lawyer Ashton Hale, and he gets the Uptown lawyer persona exactly right. Maybe the best thing the filmmakers could have done would have been to overdub the city and street names and pretend the movie was set in some fictitious town that just happened to look a lot like the Quarter.
Which brings us to my point, at last: Can you make a film set in New Orleans and not acknowledge the effects of Katrina and the levees breaking? Some critics didn’t like the way that Deja Vu showed scenes of the Lower Ninth and claimed it was exploiting the tragedy, but I disagreed entirely. I liked that Deja Vu portrayed the city as it was post-Katrina; most of the action took place in the Quarter area because that was one of the few intact post-K areas, but you can see damage and no one is acting as though the hurricane did not occur. However, what if I decided I wanted to shoot a romantic comedy in New Orleans today? I have all these cute little screenplays from my screenwriting days, written in the early 1990s, and could I film them without updating them to allow for the current state of the city? Personally, I couldn’t do it — I’d want to capture the city the way it is now, with people complaining about Road Home and still having to house relatives in their spare rooms and wondering if the city will ever feel safe enough or the schools will ever improve.
I think that filmmakers will have to incorporate the new New Orleans, battered and dangerous and problematic as it may be, in any movie they want to set in the area. Unless you’re going to shoot New Orleans and pretend it’s another region, you can’t ignore the effects of August 2005. You could shoot Flakes in New Orleans now — most of the locations are probably still in the same shape. But you’d have to change the characters and the dialogue and some of the story elements. And yet, I wonder if the film would be plausible even post-Katrina; if it’s even possible to shoot a light romantic comedy about a couple of white twentysomething slackers with dreams of being an artist and musician.
Finally, I naturally wonder if I’m overreacting. It has been known to happen. I heard (but can’t find a link to an article or anything on his blog) that Variety writer Joe Leydon loved seeing the New Orleans locations in Flakes because he grew up there. [Updated 4/8: Joe Leydon’s review of Flakes for Variety.] The pre-K discrepancies apparently didn’t bother him. And of course they’re not going to bother anyone else who has spent his/her life in a region that wasn’t affected by Katrina. If only a handful of us will be bothered by a fantasy New Orleans where hurricanes always turn away at the last minute, maybe it’s not worthwhile for filmmakers to have to deal with the real city and its decidedly uncinematic problems and attitudes. After all, it’s not like filmmakers haven’t been showing us a fantasy New Orleans on film up until now anyway. What do you think?