collected writings

bright leaves

The films that documentarian Ross McElwee creates are less like education, and more like well produced, humorously quiet family home video.

Previously, before "Bright Leaves," he was best known for the 1986 film "Sherman's March," which purports to be about General Sherman's rampage through the south during the Civil War, but is actually about the different women that have traveled through McElwee's life: "High Fidelity" meets the History Channel.

McElwee's newest offering, "Bright Leaves," explores his family's roots in the South Carolina tobacco industry, but the film takes many sidesteps and shortcuts, searching more for questions than for answers. The result is a very refreshing, personal film, a stark departure from the current Michael Moore era of staged mudslinging.

Instead, "Bright Leaves" follows a personal journey of understanding, full of family tragedy (the McElwee clan's perpetual envy of the mighty Duke Tobacco industry, after a series of suspicious fires in the McElwee's storehouses back in the day,) to his love and knowledge of film and filmmaking.

Tracing the history of "Bright Leaf," a 1950 film starring Montana native Gary Cooper, and inspired by the rivalry between Ross McElwee's great-grandfather John McElwee (founder of the Bull Durham tobacco line) and Washington Duke (creator of the first mass produced tobacco), Ross travels on a strange journey.

He interviews film historian Vlada Petric about the Cooper film, but the interview is not nearly as interesting as the moment when Petric declares how he wishes to be interviewed (involving a backward wheelchair, among other things.) Here, McElwee shows his style; a taste for the eccentric, but he refrains from the tongue-in-cheek joshing like Michael Moore's infamous Rabbit Lady.

The result is a film that is sometimes melancholy, when McElwee grieves over his family's stake in tobacco use today, but also because such a beautiful, vibrant plant has to be so dangerous. Imagine how many people would be happier today if tobacco was beneficial instead of harmful.

McElwee chats with current smokers, youths just starting, married couples pledging to give up smoking within the next decade, and elderly patients dying from lung cancer, but he never stays with any subject long, and refuses to pass judgment.

McElwee makes these films personal on purpose, to avoid grappling with heavy issues, and that is when "Bright Leaves" is most entertaining. He approaches archival family footage, featured throughout this documentary, with the same attitude that he puts into his own projects... something that his own children and grandchildren will watch and wonder what he was thinking.

In the end, McElwee reaches the somewhat underwhelming conclusion that everyone has their own addictions, and that everyone has their own reason for both succumbing to and overcoming a vice. It is clear that understanding and archiving his history and life on film is his personal obsession. Sometimes, it seems, some vices are better than others.