Bright Leaves

While not exactly a household name, Ross McElwee has a tremendous reputation in critical circles as a groundbreaking film documentarian specializing in autobiographical material about love and loss focused geographically in North Carolina, where he grew up.

My first exposure to McElwee was his 1986 “Sherman’s March” that I described thusly:

Ross McElwee’s 1986 “Sherman’s March” is now available in DVD. The alternative but unwieldy title is “A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation” conveys the film-maker’s deeper motivation in making this quirky but brilliant documentary. Starting out as a project on General William Tecumseh Sherman’s bloody march through his native South, the film rapidly turns into a meditation on the difficulty of finding love under the shadow of the bomb.

The film is structured around a series of encounters between the diffident, tall, bearded and bespectacled film-maker and Southern belles who friends and family hook him up with on blind dates. He also looks up old flames. This becomes his own march through the South with a lot less bloodshed but a lot more angst.

Although I never reviewed his 1994 “Time Indefinite”, I can only agree what the always perceptive Stephen Holden wrote in the N.Y. Times:

When Mr. McElwee reaches the nadir of metaphysical angst, he interviews himself and offers reflections that sound like the musings of a WASP Woody Allen, minus the ego and epigrammatic wit of an Allen character.

What makes “Time Indefinite” a rich and compelling cinematic experience isn’t the story, which is really everyone’s story at a certain time of life, nor is it Mr. McElwee’s drily witty commentary. It is the movie’s visual appetite for life. “Time Indefinite” conveys a sensuous appreciation of the physical world that is so acute that the environment is almost as important as the people. The season, the weather, the time of day and the light and spatial dimensions of a room are so palpable that the movie often gives the feeling of being there. Again and again, the film pauses to study the faces of people who, for all their problems, radiate a deep, poignant enjoyment of life.

Made in 2003, “Bright Leaves” is now available in home video and is a worthy addition to the McElwee oeuvre, as they put it. McElwee got the inspiration for this movie after visiting a cousin in North Carolina who kept a basement full of film memorabilia, including a poster for “Bright Leaf”, the 1950 movie starring Gary Cooper as tobacco grower Brant Royle. As it turns out, the director was Michael Curtiz, who was also responsible for the Stalin-worshiping “Mission to Moscow“.

The film was based on a 1949 novel of the same name by Foster Fitzsimmons that, according to McElwee’s cousin, fictionalized the struggle between Ross’s grandfather George McElwee and James Duke, the founder of the American Tobacco Company.

They ran rival tobacco companies in Charlotte, North Carolina until James Duke stole George McElwee’s formula for Bull Durham tobacco and destroyed his business. That, at least, was McElwee family lore and supported by the 1950 movie, at least in the opinion of Ross’s cousin.

This leads Ross to conduct an Inspector Clouseau type investigation into the case, which involved an interview with the 90 year old widow of the author of “Bright Leaf” the novel and an equally elderly Patricia Neal who had a starring role in the 1950 movie. Both women are extremely witty and knowledgeable even in their advanced years. Fitzsimmons’s widow adds that the story was totally made up and had nothing to do with the McElwee family history.

If “Sherman’s March” provided an entry point for the examination of nuclear war, so does “Bright Leaves” reflect on another social ill, namely the social costs of smoking. Ross’s physician father treated lung cancer cases all his life, including people who worked the tobacco fields or in the Duke factories. If he resents the Dukes for ruining his grandfather economically, there is at least the consolation in knowing that the McElwees were not responsible for the deaths of perhaps millions.

The movie includes McElwee’s puts sardonic humor on display as he wanders through the Duke Tobacco museum and various other landmarks in his home town. Unlike any other film documentarian working today, McElwee uses his own narrative voice to deepen the impact of the images. His voice is unmistakable, combining ruefulness with a self-deprecating sense of humor. On McElwee’s website, you can read transcripts of the three films mentioned here, as well as others. As should be obvious from this excerpt from “Bright Leaves”, you will be in touch with an uncommon intelligence when watching these jewels of a film:

My father began his medical practice not long after my grandfather died.

I filmed him at work a few times.

And at play.

Here he is at an earlier family reunion.

I wish I’d made movies of my mother, but she died before I began shooting film.

I say I wish I had movies of my mother, but in another way, I wonder what difference it would make…

I mean, even in these images, as time goes by, my father is beginning to seem less and less real to me – almost a fictional character.

I want so much to reverse this shift. the way in which the reality of him is slipping away.

Having this footage doesn’t help very much – or at least not as much as I thought it would.

What does help is the land itself – being back here again. This little valley is about an hour from where I grew up.

North Carolina still seems, in a kind of understated way, like the most beautiful place in the world to me.

And woven right into this landscape that I’m so fond of is tobacco…

So many people I know down here have their own complicated relationship to tobacco, their own tobacco stories, and I set out to visit some of them.