Courtesy of The Cinema Guild
The King and Queen of Mobile, Alabama's Mardi Gras, Max Bruckmann and Helen Meaher, and their court in the documentary "The Order of Myths."
Throughout Margaret Brown's moving and surprising documentary "The Order of Myths" we are assured that the Mardi Gras traditions of Mobile, Ala., remain strictly segregated because both of the city's major racial communities want it that way. Of course, it's generally white people who say that to Brown's camera, and the way they say it isn't terribly different from the way many Southern whites, in another era, talked about the Jim Crow laws.
But Brown's film is nothing if not subtle, and the fact that those sentiments spring from a racist history doesn't necessarily make them untrue. Across the breadth of Brown's compassionate portrait of Mobile's black and white Mardi Gras festivities in 2007 -- which coexist peaceably enough but rarely interact -- we come to see a city alternately puzzled, imprisoned and enraptured by its past, where people do things a certain way because they can't imagine anything else. Overt racial discrimination plays no role in Mobile today (the city has an African-American mayor, its first), but its society remains economically and geographically segregated with a rigor that rivals apartheid South Africa.