Completed after the 2017 Charlottesville clash between right-wing racists and leftist opponents—but before the nationwide 2020 George Floyd riots—Monumental Crossroads is indeed timely. Dutch filmmaker Tim Van den Hoff (narrating but largely off-camera) makes a 6,000-mile journey through the American south, confronting the topic of Confederate Civil War memorials and whether they should be preserved out of respect for history and "heritage" or eliminated because of the shame of slavery they supposedly represent. Can something worthwhile be salvaged from these statues, plaques, bas-reliefs, and stars-and-bars flags?
Van den Hoff has the virtue of listening to voices of southerners themselves—though nay-sayers might well accuse the filmmaker, not hiding his opinions, of being a big-city liberal outsider crusading against what he ill comprehends.
In Birmingham, Alabama, black mayoral candidate Frank Matthews runs passionately on a platform of ridding the city of its main Confederate memorial; meanwhile, in the same state, Mayor Kenneth Nail of Henceville (overwhelmingly white, according to the filmmaker), is equally articulate as he explains why he offered his town as a sanctuary for monuments removed by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu.
The film is most in sympathy with New Orleans muralist Brandan "BMike" Odoms, whose work emphasizes the struggle of enslaved people, not their masters. In North Carolina, by contrast, Van den Hoff finds the living embodiment of a Dave Chappelle sketch, a fiercely proud southern black man declaring the Yankee invasion ruined things for everybody, and that contributions of hardworking black folk who supported General Lee and Jefferson Davis deserve to be honored. A Daughters of the Confederacy member compares southern culture to those routinely celebrated in Asian or Hispanic festivals, with their own varicolored flags and idols. What is the difference?
Van den Hoff isn't buying it. Not without reason, he judges sentiment over the short-lived southern "lost cause" to be a heinous whitewash of a racist past. But he also exhibits the fashionable European POV of much of the USA—specifically small towns and hinterlands outside the NY-LA orbit—as gun-crazed, backward, and willfully ignorant. The camera regards a Civil War historical re-enactment troupe in Tennessee with horror (never mind that Union soldiers and Abraham Lincoln are also portrayed on the field) whilst black and white schoolchildren look on.
Though it asks proper questions and scores a few direct-hit mortar shells against Confederacy apologists, Monumental Crossroads edges towards the cancel culture that threatens to denude shelves of Twain and a few choice Ken Burns titles. A strong optional purchase. Aud: H, C, P.