The Order of Myths.

"Margaret Brown's penetrating The Order of Myths... explores a potentially enraging subject - rigidly upheld racial segregation in the country's oldest Mardi Gras celebration, in Mobile, Alabama - but her touch is so unforced and her gaze so open that no one is bruised," writes David Edelstein in New York. "The situation is heartbreaking, the people... inured. Set. Following rituals passed down from evil times, too timid or unimaginative or, maybe, although it's well below the surface these days, racist to challenge them. You just don't know."

"Brown hasn't made agit-prop or a heavy-handed exposé of the obvious (viz., Southern racism is alive and well, just more genteel and better-disguised)," writes Vadim Rizov in the Voice. "Quietly shocking, The Order of Myths is a deft, engrossing cross-section of Mobile life, heavy on local color and insight."

Updated through 7/27.

"Easy enough for the cosmopolitan viewer to feel comfortably superior to Brown's misguided subjects (of both races) who are willing to accept such an embarrassing state of affairs, but the filmmaker does a good job of suggesting just how strong a pull tradition continues to exert on Southern culture and how that culture's unquestioned customs - having taken on the order of myths - tend to close off any discussion of potential change," writes Andrew Schenker in Slant. "So when the African-American king and queen attend the coronation ceremony of their white counterparts and are moved to tears by the warm reception they receive, it would be easy enough to scoff at the naïve pleasure they take in a vaguely condescending recognition, but when we take into account the cultural framework that makes their very attendance into something of a radical gesture, it becomes clear that the situation is fraught with unseen complexities that makes nonsense of such a hastily registered response. If, despite a rather too-abrupt ending and a somewhat indifferent visual conception, Brown's film can be termed a success, its principal achievement is in giving us some measure of these complexities."

"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," notes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "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."

"Even if [Brown] occasionally sidesteps potentially explosive subplots, as when Mobile's shameful legacy of modern lynching is left on the back burner, her Myths is an essential investigation of American mask and reality," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine.

Earlier: Reviews from Sundance.

Update: For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Brown "about the challenges of filming secretive organizations, her mother's anticipated response to a burning cross in her yard, and the rule about when it's OK to leave your friend's bad movie."

Updates, 7/25: "More than most, Ms Brown knows that there's nothing black and white about race in America, and nothing specifically Southern about its calamities," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Or maybe she's just more honest. The extent of her sincerity doesn't become apparent until late in the proceedings, when she reveals a personal connection to Mobile that gives this very fine movie a bracing emotional kicker. In contrast to the cloistered, all-white Mardi Gras membership group (called a mystic society) that gives the movie its poetic and freighted title, Ms Brown has a beautiful grasp of gray."

"The tendency to skew toward a Rainbow Coalition vibe makes it feel like part of the story is MIA, yet this microcosmic look at race relations is a great reminder that, even in the year of Obama, we remain a nation divided between black and white," writes David Fear in Time Out New York.

"[I]t is the kind of illuminating work that sends audiences stumbling home in a wide-eyed state of astonishment," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun.

At the AV Club, Noel Murray gives the doc a B+.

"The Order of Myths is not some Yankee carpetbagger's exposé on the lingering effects of Deep South white supremacy, although they are as inescapable as the Gulf Coast humidity," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Brown is a white Mobile native, with a personal connection to the city's Mardi Gras history that is revealed late in the film. She views Mardi Gras in Mobile - it's the oldest such tradition in America, because the city was founded before New Orleans - with a combination of ruthlessness and tenderness."

"[L]ike gently lifting a decaying flagstone with a twig, Brown has managed, in a fleet 75 minutes, to uncover quite a lot about (obviously) America's entrenched racism and (perhaps not so obviously) why our presumably modern sensibilities allow for its continuity," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE, who also notes, "This is highly sophisticated nonfiction filmmaking, and as lensed by Michael Simmonds, the cinematographer on Ramin Bahrani's lovely Chop Shop, made wonderfully vivid, especially in the final nighttime moments of the Carnival, popping with rich velvety purples and reds."

"The 'docs are dead' mantra... is perhaps most harmful in the way it compresses the varied modes of documentary practice into yet another genre to be compared and contrasted alongside 'blockbusters,' 'foreign films' and 'romantic comedies'; it makes it easier for audiences to forget the unlimited richness of documentary practice," writes Reverse Shot's Jeff Reichert. "The pundits hurt, but the filmmakers themselves have hurt matters worse.... [W]hy would people go to docs when the recipe so often boils down to little more than: Hot Button Issue + Sketchy 'Cultural Impact' of Said Issue + How Issue Affects My Family, Man + Gotcha! Exposé Moment –Attempts at Aesthetic Unity = Film. Thank goodness then for the bracing eye and refreshing candor of Margaret Brown's The Order of Myths."

IFC's Alison Willmore talks with Brown.

Update, 7/27: "The Order of Myths is less a vitriolic critique than a considerate, despairing depiction of the intractable sway exerted by long-held, unpleasant traditions," writes Nick Schager at Cinematical. "Accepted it unquestionably is. But as Brown's shrewd doc makes clear through tight editorial juxtapositions, telling snapshots, and refusal to belittle or disparage her sometimes-repugnant subjects, acceptable it most certainly is not."

Posted by dwhudson at July 23, 2008 6:29 AM