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The Moving Image 5.1 (2005) 140-143


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Bright Leaves (2003). Produced, directed, filmed, and written by Ross McElwee.

Ross McElwee's films have a disarming capacity to bring home their messages with a surprising intimacy, and his latest is no exception. Bright Leaves deeply stirred my memories of my own family's experiences with tobacco, so I will tell you a couple of them because of their pertinence to the matter at hand. In and of themselves, they are not significant, but Ross McElwee's new "personal documentary" about tobacco and his family should encourage viewers to see connections between themselves and the grim ironies inherent in the mass production and marketing of an addictive substance.


Click for larger view		 Figure 1

My father was a physician who gave a talk or two warning young people about the hazards of smoking. His credibility on this topic, however, was limited because, for most of his adult life, he was a habitual smoker. (Are there any other kind?) After one such talk at a high school in Morenci, Arizona, he retired to the soda fountain at a drugstore nearby. There, after lunch, he enjoyed a cigarette amid a scattered crowd of students who had heard him speak and were now enjoying a smoke of their own. The irony of that moment was lost on no one, though the message of his talk was lost on all.

For a decade or more, my older brother enjoyed some success as a model for Western fashions, but he thought his ship had come in when he was hired to be Ely Cutter, a legendary hero of the old West, whose exploits were carefully invented by advertising agents at Philip Morris to promote a new brand of cigarette named after this imaginary character. After market testing in several locales, the tobacco [End Page 140] giant decided to cut its losses and abandoned the Ely Cutter campaign. During this time, my brother also aspired to replace the Marlboro Man, who had died of lung cancer.

McElwee lore has it that Ross's great-grandfather, John Harvey McElwee, was forced out of the tobacco business by his rival, James Buchanan Duke, during the late 1800s and lost an unimaginable fortune, an empire of capitalist enterprise, in the process. There's even a movie about it, a blockbuster by Warner Bros.' premier director of the 1940s and 50s, Michael Curtiz. It's called Bright Leaf (1950) and features Gary Cooper playing great-grandfather McElwee opposite Patricia Neal and Lauren Bacall. Cooper was in the midst of a steamy extramarital affair with Neal during the filming of Bright Leaf. During an interview in his own movie about all these things and more, Ross remarks to Patricia Neal, "If Brant Royale (Gary Cooper) and Margaret Singleton (Patricia Neal) had had children, you'd be my grandmother—from a fictional point of view."

This is a paradigmatic McElwee moment. The difficulties of knowing where the imagination ends and the world begins provide the traction for a wry search for answers to an unstoppable proliferation of questions. The mere existence of a mainstream Hollywood film that allegedly concerns so personal a family story perfectly situates this filmmaker's chronic Bovarysme. McElwee has previously written about the deep affinity he feels for the fiction of Walker Percy; and in his 1961 novel The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling, "a moviegoer living in New Orleans," is Percy's Emma Bovary. Both McElwee's fascination with film's power to render reality and his susceptibility to such compelling renditions of the world on screen place him, like Binx and Emma, engagingly on the boundary between skepticism and belief, if not gullibility. Crosscurrents of conviction and doubt thus animate this easygoing film, and powerful mood swings of anger and dismay belie the ironies of historical experience that McElwee continually exposes. He is focusing upon matters of life and death that we often shrug off with fatal consequences.

Visiting the Duke Mansion in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his friend and frequent film subject, Charleen Swansea, Ross lapses into the sort of melodrama that he...

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