DVD OF THE WEEK: Moving Midway

Moving Midway
Directed by Godfrey Cheshire
2008, 98 minutes, U.S.A.
First Run Features

Documentary filmmakers rarely know if and when it's appropriate to insert themselves into their own projects, but in his superbly entertaining and tough-minded directorial debut, New York-based film critic Godfrey Cheshire proves he's certainly seen and written about enough docs (notably those of Ross McElwee, who serves as a consulting producer) to recognize that his onscreen self is an essential role. Turning his camera on Midway Plantation, a centuries-old estate in rural North Carolina that has been in his family for generations, Cheshire introduces us to his cousin Charlie "Pooh" Silver and a Fitzcarraldo-esque plan to literally pick up the ancestral home and move it to a quieter locale, away from the highway, strip malls and real-estate developers now invading its space. Moving Midway is not another tired dysfunctional family memoir, however, nor is it just the story of an old building to be saved—but as an essay on the troubled legacy of American history itself, it's inspiring and complex and still warmly nostalgic without guilt.

As appropriately pointed out through movie clips (The Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind, etc.), the icon of a Southern plantation has different profound meanings depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon line you call home. Early on, Cheshire discovers Robert Hinton—an NYU professor of African studies whose bloodline traces back to the slaves who built Midway—and invites him along for the journey, beginning with a significant dinner at the mansion. The tension is palpable, or at least suspenseful, and it's not because anyone of the older generation shows any racist tendencies (best depicted in a whites-only Civil War re-enactment that shows people simply don't agree on what the war was even about). It's that the historical elephant in the room is finally allowed to trumpet through civilized confrontation and discourse in an era not terribly far removed; the energy is intense. While investigating the ghosts of his past (literally: plates fly off the shelves in Midway, attributed to the late Miss Mary Hinton, the plantation's former figurehead), Cheshire even unearths a whole segment of slave-descendent cousins he didn't know he had, and it's in a scene where he meets some of them that his background—one foot rooted in the South, the other in the metropolitan North where he now lives—that his function as curious, even-handed moderator is the genial embodiment of so-called "post-racial" America. The true meaning of evolution isn't about no longer seeing color, but being able to comfortably discuss race with anyone, to debate or debunk when necessary, so that we can have the grown-up conversations to truly move on. Moving Midway proves a vital stepping stone, and a witty treat that never feels like PBS homework.

Posted by ahillis at February 17, 2009 4:16 PM