Shopping With Filmmakers: Margaret Brown

Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths opens at the IFC Center in New York on Friday. This review is adapted from our coverage of the film at the SXSW Film Festival, where we also interviewed the director. Above: Brown shops and talks at Sundance.

Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths offers an immersion into the archaic miasma that is Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama. It’s the world’s oldest celebration of its kind, and tradition mandates that the two weeks worth of parties and parades are mostly racially segregated. Using Mardi Gras season as a microcosm for a portrait of contemporary race relations in the city, Brown gets a filmmaker’s dream gift in the black and white Mardi Gras associations’ selection of their queens.

Queen Stephanie, a black schoolteacher, is a descendant of a group of slaves who were transported on the Clothilde, the last slave ship to enter the US. When the Clothilde came ashore, there was a fire and the passengers escaped into the woods, ultimately settling in an area that came to be known as Africatown. Queen Helen Meaher, whose family now owns most of the land in Africatown, is a descendant of the company that brought the Clothilde over. “My people was on her people’s ship,” Stephanie says, with a slow, matter-of-fact nod. That nod confirms the film’s thesis: racism isn’t an outrage or even a spoken issue Mobile––it’s casual, habitual, and historically excused.

Blending highly controlled fly-on-the-wall verite action with talking head contextualization, Myths finds an unusual tonal sweet spot somewhere in between absurdist comedy and studious melancholy, in its consideration of two groups at a socio-historical impasse. Both the black and white camps invest an inordinate amount of money in their celebrations––Queen Stephanie describes her Mardi Gras budget as being equivalent to “a good car, a car and a half”––and Brown plumbs the bejeweled spoils of these expenditures both as comic relief, and as a marker of difference.

Helen and the members of her court seem to spend the Mardi Gras pre-season doing nothing but sipping out of silver goblets and trying on headdresses, all with the kind of nonchalance that could only come from people accustomed to indulgence. Queen Stephanie and her king spend their days working at the same grade school, where their experience of Mardi Gras is partially filtered through stories read by their students. Mardi Gras is a one-time-only investment for Stephanie, but it pays dividends in pure emotional experience to her extended social network. Certainly, the Meagher family never comments on how much Helen’s reign costs, and Helen herself seems to treat the whole endeavor as less of an honor than an obligation.

In his Variety review of the film, the progressively problematic John Anderson criticized Brown for essentially mocking her subjects, and while I think that’s a misguided read, I can see where he gets it. It’s not until one of the film’s final frames, in which Brown reveals that one of her talking head sources, a mystic society member and husband of a former Queen who is most adamantly in favor of Mardi Gras segregation, is the filmmaker’s grandfather. Without that admission, The Order of Myths might feel like an outsider’s caricature, but with it, everything that proceeds it is colored as a personal story. Brown is not, as Anderson puts it, out to “make some easy targets look ridiculous”––she’s grappling with her own heritage through an outward-directed portrait of those who share it and those who have been historically at odds with it. It’s a personal doc in which the person gracefully bounces the spotlight on to others. To imply that this kind of subtle, displaced autobiography is exploitative, especially in contrast to some of the more self-indulgent works of non-fiction coming off the festival circuit, feels like a knee-jerk miscalculation.