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Natchez

If ever there were a documentary that feels like a PD James murder mystery, it's "Natchez." 

The setup is almost too good to be true. In Natchez, Mississippi, there are eccentric boomers who belong to a "Garden Club"; each boomer leads tours through his or her own haunted mansion. Tension arises because a Black woman joins the Garden Club, and the Black woman wants her white colleagues to begin to wrestle both with slavery and with the *legacy* of slavery. The ensuing "community meeting"--with deep sighs, half-ironic statements, and the frequent clearing of throats--is a wonderfully passive-aggressive disaster. It is miraculous that someone agreed to have a camera present for this event.

That's frequently the case throughout the movie--people say terrible things. People say these things on camera! The filmmaker must have counted her lucky stars night after night after night. (It's unfortunately a cliche of documentary filmmaking that the final minutes must involve a "gotcha" moment. The gotcha moment here is utterly predictable--and though some of the details, involving Hilary Clinton, are memorable, the scene itself is not one of the film's brilliant moments.)

In a movie full of great characters, my favorite is a white woman named Tracy. At the start of the film (which unfolds over three years), Tracy is struggling to hold on to her marriage. She has naive views about the antebellum South. As the story unfolds, Tracy becomes a single woman. ("I don't need a million things. I just need peace.") As she then begins to renovate her life, she discovers that she actually wants to *understand* the South. And we see her processing new and disturbing bits of history--it's a privilege to see her changing in real time. (I have a strong suspicion that she will be OK.)

What a terrific movie.
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