Bright Leaves

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.

"Bright Leaves" is one of the absolute greatest documentary films of all time. It has made it to my top 10 favorite films list because of how much it, simply, amazed me!

The film revolves around the tobacco industry, the film industry, the McElwee family history, and many interesting characters we meet throughout the film. These characters have many interesting stories to tell, whether they're tragic or funny.

There's McElwee's film expert cousin, his hard to connect with 12 year old son, a couple trying to quit their smoking habits, and so on. These characters (I know they're real people, I'll call them characters anyway) are really what makes "Bright Leaves" so special, along with the, at times quite clever and funny, narration by the filmmaker, and the greatly interesting, highly personal presentation of it all.

Going into it, I expected this to be more of a pro-tobacco industry film, however, the film really does show the true negativity that smoking causes. We see the bad affects it has on health and the troubling process of trying to quit.

For those looking for a BBC-style documentary on the history of the tobacco industry, will not find much enjoyment here. However, if you like McElwee's style and would enjoy a quirky, funny, and, sometimes, almost heartbreaking, portrait of the McElwee family history, you should definitely check this one out! It's absolutely spectacular (and highly underrated) documentary film!

Seen at NYFF. Ross McElwee has perfected a sui generis form of personal-confession, free-associating, voiced-over "documentary" (if that's the word) that isn't quite like anything else. (Comparisons will doubtless be made with Michael Moore, but the difference is obvious: Moore hammers his points home, while McElwee tries to pretend that he doesn't have any to make.) Five years, he tells us, in the making, the film mines his native North Carolina for musings on tabacco, its ravages, its sweet consolations, and the fact that his family lost its fortunes to the Duke clan and then made back a more modest one by treating the victims of the industry that that clan had perfected. Oh, and that he had a father and has a son he whom he loved and loves beyond all telling. And that there was a Michael Curtiz/Gary Cooper movie, "Bright Leaf", that may or may not be about his family, but that we all ought to go check out anyway, if only to see Cooper interact on screen with his then lover Patricia Neal, who turns up in the now-doughty flesh the better to frustrate McElwee in his attempts to validate his romantic notions, another theme. North Carolina is the main character here, or rather McElwee's complex relationship with it and feelings about it and about his own now-Yankeeized family. Charm and yarns, poignant reflections on time lost and time regained and how the home movies he and his family seem to have made with Friedmanesque compulsion may or may not interact with these, some pure and wonderful comedy on film itself, all come together in a rich stew.

If you expect movies to be "about" anything in particular, this film will doubtless leave you scratching your head in frustration and bafflement. If you can accept a movie that is a beautifully paced (quick/elegiac/quick) romp by a quirky mind with one of the sharpest eyes around, you'll have a great time. The festival audience (many of whom, unlike me, seemed to know what to expect) certainly did.

PS: In the Q&A, McElwee pointed out the obvious: that this film was actually made on film, not from digitized pixels. He wryly dismissed those who applauded this affirmation as flacks for Kodak, but the reason for the applause is real and obvious. What a joy it is once again to actually see detail in an image, to see faces in full and changing expression instead of in soupy facsimile. And to see real colors (and what an eye for color McElwee has) in all their changing subtlety, instead of vague planes of yellow or puce.

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

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.