La splendeur des McElwee

A sensitive treatment of the complex relationship between people, economics and a health hazard; it gives an accurate shapshot of the region (tobacco road), its views, the concerns of its people. The locations are real. The people are real. The accents are real. View this film and you are home.

Ross McElwee consistently entertains us with his unique sense of humor as he explores the possible connections between his great grandfather and the main character in Foster FitzSimons' novel "Bright Leaf." Anyone who is a lover of movies, history, and appreciates a good yarn will enjoy this film. If you are interested in the South, this film, along with McElwee's classic "Sherman's March," will give you significant insights into this region.

Documentarian Ross McElwee in "Bright Leaves" offers his second paean to the South as he continues exploring his family lineage and Southern heritage. In "Sherman's March" McElwee wryly counterpoised the South that fell to the Union general's forces to the world of that era's descendants. He sculpted an original and fascinating snapshot of the American South.

"Bright Leaves" is more personal than the earlier film. The title comes from two sources. The first is the shimmeringly green tobacco plant native to North Carolina, America's largest producer of that evil weed. It also is the title, slightly different as "Bright Leaf," of an old, excellent, not often seen film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia O'Neal. It's an undeservedly obscure movie.

McElwee got it in his mind that "Bright Leaf" (based on a novel) was based on the life of the director's forbear, his great-grandfather, a man who supposedly was duped and cheated out of a tobacco fortune by the famous Duke family after many years of protracted litigation. As Ross McElwee originally saw it, but for the nefarious acts of the Dukes, which allegedly included paying off judges, he would today be enjoying the splendor of antebellum mansion living and the accumulation of riches earned by cigarettes.

But as McElwee explores the story behind his great-grandfather's slow rise to inventiveness and steady descent to bankruptcy, he also recognizes the enormous pathology that smoking unleashed not only in the U.S. but in all countries where North Carolina's prized tobacco is avidly and compulsively consumed. No Michael Moore, his social consciousness is sincere but restrained, tempered by his North Carolina childhood.

McElwee uses interviews with family members, childhood acquaintances and many others to depict the centrality of tobacco farming in the state of his birth. A short motel room talk with Patricia O'Neal makes the cineaste wish she didn't have a hurried schedule and could have been questioned at length.

A transplanted Southerner, McElwee has lived in the North for a long time. His wife sets him off on this investigation saying he'd been away too long from the South. He involves his son at different stages of the filming, which took five years, so we see the kid change from a post-toddler to a teen apparently more interested in the technology of film-making than in his dad's heritage.

There are some very funny scenes here. The best is when a white-haired, elderly "rabid film theorist" with a rich European accent, in North Carolina to lecture, straps McElwee into a wheelchair and takes him five times around the block while spouting academic argot about making movies.

McElwee learns a great deal about tobacco raising as well as what probably is the truth about his great-grandpa. No shocking revelations but minor disappointments emerge.

What McElwee has done a second time, perhaps not fully consciously, is to support the theory of Southern Exceptionalism, a favorite of one school of history. The main exposition of that school is that the South's history and heritage is not only unique, it stamps those born there with a special pride and association with love of land not common in other parts of the U.S. Midwesterners who sojourn to great cities may or may not retain fond memories of their childhood but only Southerners remain psychologically and emotionally wedded, almost always, to their native states. It doesn't much matter whether they stay or leave, the early associations remain vivid and also shape character and beliefs in ways that separate Southerners from their fellow Americans (not always, by the way, for the best).

As an anti-smoking film, "Bright Leaves" is more gentle than most. It's obvious that most of the people filmed here know how deadly smoking is but their almost languid acceptance of a likely future neoplastic assault does make one think about free choice and the limits of regulation. An almost blasé attitude towards cancer by some of the interviewees is quietly chilling.

A fine documentary.

9/10

It was about 15 years ago that I first saw Ross McElwee's quasi-autobiographical documentary about his quest to trace General Sherman's unsuccessful campaign through the South during the Civil War. "Sherman's March" was a film which showed the delightful disconnect between McElwee's memories of vestigial Southern culture, with the man he had become. Just as the American South exemplifies the Sublime to the Ridiculous, McElwee's ostensible journey to follow the trail of Sherman's March was really an excuse to visit old girlfriends and childhood memories along the way.

"Bright Leaves" is so good a follow up to McElwee's earlier film about his search to understand his Southern roots that, rather than inviting a comparison with "Sherman's March," it simply picks up his story with a new quest. This time it's his search to understand the history of North Carolina tobacco farming, which was also a part of his family's history three generations before.

The film is at least two hours long, but not one extraneous frame is included. In McElwee's typical style, he presents us with a meandering, quiet, thoughtful and extremely funny unfolding of the tobacco story, and his signature pacing perfectly highlights the layers and layers of meaning he wants to get across.

As a Northerner and unashamed Yankee who has lived in the South for 13 years (which is 12 years too long), I can vouch that McElwee's films have just as much value for those of us who lack the DNA required to understand the South. His films are not just for born and bred Southerners who see themselves as special members of a unique and proudly eccentric group.

On a practical level, "Bright Leaves" may be the best anti-smoking film ever made, just as "Supersize Me" was the most convincing argument about the dangers of fast food. I highly recommend you take your kids to see it, too.

While it is still a personal documentary from McElwee, the master of the form, "Bright Leaves" is a film that speaks far beyond the personal. As McElwee films across the south, it seems everyone-- smoker or nonsmoker-- has a relationship with tobacco. The most amazing thing about the film is the filmmaker's even handedness and understanding for the pull that cigarette smoking has on his subjects, even though the filmmaker himself has never had a tobacco habit to peak of. Given Michael Moore's work and other popular documentaries of the day, the expectation is that "Bright Leaves" would have a stern and condemning view of the tobacco industry. On the contrary, he gives humorous insight on the age-old habit. McElwee's writing, as found in his narration, is incredibly poetic as it rolls along the blue hills of North Carolina. Even weeks later, I think of that last sequence of shots, the tanker of tobacco heading off to far lands, the shots of his son, and understand why I myself, like so many, have this attraction to smoking, or what McElwee calls the urge to give pause to time, and likens to his own filmmaking and photography.

The most how genius moment features Vlada Petric, and McElwee's long standing side character, Charlene, is still a gift. The film really does stick with you for a long, long time, and deserves lots of exposure and great distribution.

Inspired by Gary Cooper's character in a movie about the tobacco trade which he believes is based on his great-grandfather, 'Sherman's March' documentarian Ross McElwee tries to make a documentary about the rampant tobacco industry in North Carolina here. As anyone who has seen 'Sherman's March' would know, McElwee (much like Nick Broomfield) has a tendency to make his documentaries equally about himself researching a subject as the subject itself and the highlight of 'Bright Leaves' is McElwee's obsession with the Cooper movie - a film he has watched so many times that he has memorised every subtle hand movement. The film's single best part is an interview with Bosnian film director Vlada Petric who carts McElwee around on a wheelbarrow in order to make McElwee's film more "kinesthetic". Petric hits some nails quite sharply on the head in terms how overly complex McElwee's project is and 'Bright Leaves' therefore really becomes about McElwee's persistence more than anything else. On the downside, this leads to the film being very light on tobacco related content; whereas in 'Sherman's March', one really discovered some things about General Sherman as well as McElwee, the same cannot really be said here. Still, it is a commendable effort and arguably more intriguing than a straightforward tobacco documentary would have been.