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Under discussion:

The Order of Myths  (2008)

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 the world’s oldest Mardi Gras celebration, in Mobile, Alabama, where 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.

It’s not a total surprise, given his health problems and that to-do last year about his iconic thumbs, but Roger Ebert has just sent out a statement announcing his definitive split from his long-running TV show, most recently called Ebert and Roeper. The full statement is pasted after the jump. Thoughts?

After 33 years on the air, 23 of them with Disney, the studio  has decided to take the program named “Siskel & Ebert” and then “Ebert & Roeper” in a new direction. I will no longer be associated with it.

The show was a wonderful experience. It was a great loss to me when surgery in July 2006 made it impossible for me to appear on the air any longer. Although I remained active behind the scenes,  I feel that Richard Roeper and several co-hosts, notably Michael Phillips and A.O. Scott, have excelled at carrying on the tradition Gene Siskel and I began in 1975 with “Sneak Previews” on PBS.

Gene and I felt the formula was simplicity itself: Two film critics, sitting across the aisle from each other in a movie balcony, debating the new films of the week. We developed an entirely new concept for TV that has lasted all these years.  Few shows have been on the air so long and remained so popular. We made television history, and established the trademarked catch-phrase “Two thumbs up.”

The trademark still belongs to me and Marlene Iglitzen, Gene’s widow, and the thumbs will return. We are discussing possibilities, and plan to continue the show’s tradition.

Under discussion:

The Dark Knight  (2008)

If you’ve been on the Internet at all this past week, you’ve probably heard that Heath Ledger could receive a posthumous Oscar nomination for his performance in The Dark Knight. That’s with emphasis on could, because, after all, anyone could be nominated. Uwe Boll could be nominated for Best Director. He won’t be, but he could be.

And apparently Ledger probably won’t be nominated either. A Reuters article has collected quotes (not new) from the realists commenting on Ledger’s actual Oscar chances, which Los Angeles Times‘ Tom O’Neil says is a “long shot.” He also provided the following expert comment: “That’s how reluctant Oscar voters are to hug the dead. These awards are all about hugs and there’s something creepy about embracing the dead.” Meanwhile Leonard Maltin says the excitement is a “phenomenon of the Internet age” and is merely a “wish-fulfillment rumor.”

Does this mean the Internerds are over-hyping Ledger’s performance and in doing so are maybe actually ruining Ledger’s chance for that posthumous Oscar?

Certainly Terry Gilliam (who thinks the buzz originates from Warner Bros.) would again be grateful to the legions of movie geeks on the web, but is it only the bloggers and the even less respected geeks who are doing the worst damage?

Now that the real promotional appearances and actual reviews are out, it seems that bigger buzz is coming from people who typically receive more respect than those of us who are mere blog writers:

• TDK costars Michael Caine, who has championed for a nomination on such venues as The Tonight Show and The View, and Gary Oldman, who mentioned Oscar in an AP article.
• Filmmaker Kevin Smith, also quoted in the AP article.
• Richard Roeper and Michael Phillips, who called Ledger’s performance “Academy Award caliber” on At the Movies with Ebert and Roeper.
• Roger Ebert himself
• Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers
• Toronto Star critic Peter Howell, who also wants Oscar noms for Best Picture and Best Director and who acknowledges the death=Oscar junk by writing, “Ledger, whose incandescent performance would have attracted serious Oscar talk even without the actor’s untimely passing.”
• Non-”top critic” — but still non-blog critic — Gina Carbone of Seacoast Newspapers, who apologetically yet non-apologetically writes, “I’m tired of the early Oscar talk too, but when you’re talking the best performance in years, if not decades, it’s worth talking about.” She also wants an additional Oscar nom, for Best Makeup.
• Newswires like Reuters and AP
• And even O’Neil, who has at least carried the Oscar buzz into his own writings

For awhile there, I thought so much Oscar buzz would disappointingly influence a nomination for the wrong reasons. Now I think so much Oscar buzz could disappointingly influence a snub for the wrong reasons.

What do you think? Is Ledger’s performance really worthy of an Oscar? Or is it being overhyped? And either way, is it unrealistic or unhelpful (especially when considering the others deserving of posthumous Oscars) to continue championing him so far in advance?