Bright Leaves (review)

Ross McElwee is the odd son out in a family of doctors. His grandfather, father, and brother all became physicians, but he wound up making cinema vérité and teaching filmmaking at Harvard. In Bright Leaves, his seventh feature-length documentary, he returns to his native North Carolina to look at the tobacco industry. McElwee often features friends and relatives in his films, giving his work a subjective, home-movie feel. Here the family connection goes back to his great-grandfather, John Harvey McElwee, a North Carolina tobacco baron. John McElwee ran afoul of James Buchanan Duke, who appropriated his popular tobacco brand and marketed it as "Bull Durham"; when challenged in court, Duke ruined McElwee with expensive litigation and, some say, serial arson. McElwee faded into obscurity, his only memorial a flimsy sign in a run-down park.

This film turns on a chance discovery. A cinephile cousin tells Ross McElwee that the main character in Bright Leaf, a 1950 Hollywood potboiler, was supposedly based on John McElwee: it seems that great-grandfather, played by Gary Cooper, may have been properly memorialized after all. McElwee picks up his camera and starts asking about the film, the Duke rivalry, and the role of tobacco in his family's history. What happens next is not easy to summarize. McElwee uses his "docu-doodle" format to reflect on everything from the contingency of fame to the virtues of a good tracking shot. What he always returns to, and what makes the film medically interesting, is cigarette addiction. McElwee keeps coming across sick smokers, including some operated on by his surgeon father and brother. The industry that his great-grandfather helped to build, he wryly observes, provided his surgeon family with an "agricultural-pathological trust fund."

North Carolina surgeons would be less fully employed if more smokers would quit—but few do, at least in this film. "Life steps in and I find an excuse to smoke again," says a woman recovering from cancer surgery. The camera spies on robed patients in a hospital's dingy smoking patio, gratefully lighting up behind a privacy fence. An ex-smoker himself, McElwee recalls the pleasant trance of smoking alone, and the sensual joys of smoking with others. He finds himself "as susceptible as anyone to the entrancing allure of smoking, the gently erotic possibilities it offers to bring to our everyday lives." His subjects share his feelings. "I kept smoking," a young woman named Emily confesses, "because I loved to smoke."

Emily is engaged to another smoker, named Brian. Thinking that the camera will force the issue, Emily and Brian permit McElwee to film their attempt to give up cigarettes. They take their last drags in a bowling alley, pledging to quit before their marriage. The wedding day comes, and bride and groom are puffing away. When will they quit? After the honeymoon. The next time we meet them, three months later, they are still at it. "We were back home, and it was tough," Brian explains; "it's not like we've dropped it. . . . We're thinking New Year's." Other subjects prefer outright denial to rationalization. Asked about her late mother's lung cancer, a prosperous tobacco farmer says: "My growing tobacco has nothing to do with my mother dying. It has nothing to do with anyone who died."

McElwee has a cool, ethnographic intelligence. He wants less to ridicule tobacco-friendly attitudes than to trace their origins. They lie, ultimately, in North Carolina's climate and soil, ideally suited to bright-leaf tobacco. The crop became so much a part of the state's natural and social ecology as to make smoking seem inevitable, even desirable. "Might as well die of something that's gonna help out the economy," says a tobacco-festival beauty queen. The camera lingers on bespangled children preparing for the festival parade. They all declare that they will shun the nasty weed—but we know what snares lie ahead for them as partying...