Bright Leaves

Favorite docu/essay film, saw it back in early 2021. McElwee notes that the style for Bright Leaves is both self-reflexive and cinema verite. The narration that blankets the film often enters into the essayistic kind of introspection that doesn't exist in straight cinema verite pictures. The major example of this, in my view, is the series of home video shots dedicated to the son Adrian where McElwee reflects on his attempt to somehow stop the boy's aging by capturing moments on film, or on his awareness that Adrian will one day look back at McElwee's films. The cinema verite style really shines through in the impromptu, unstructured interviews McElwee features throughout the film. The moment where Shirley (I think it was) spots a random black cat in the background and the camera pans to try to find it before returning to Shirley, all without any cuts, shows the effort to capture life "as it is." Additionally, showing the film theorist constructing his little kinesthetic contraption also leans into this cinema verite style. His comparison of his own filmmaking to the tramp steamers is also such a delightful connection to make. Tramp steamers don't operate on rigid, well-defined schedules. They don't stick to particular itineraries. They take up whatever work is available to them, just as McElwee takes up whatever shots are available to him. He doesn't have a designated structure that he's complying with or a script that he's following. He does have a purpose (to discover more about the history of his Southern family's tobacco heritage) just as tramp steamers do (to ship around cargo), but he isn't bound by a set path by which to explore that purpose. I really enjoyed all of it, but I do want to highlight a particularly compelling motif he incorporated, which was the couple trying to quit smoking together. He featured them at least three times, and each time they were at the deadline they've given themselves to stop smoking or they had established what that deadline would be. It helped showcase the legacy of McElwee's great grandfather's tobacco business in a really human way: the difficulty of shrugging off nicotine addiction. I think most everyone else in the film has resigned themselves to being smokers or has successfully given that practice up, but these two are in the middle of that fight and we see how difficult it is to win. That's probably what made this narrative thread stick out to me so much.

This movie's trailer was very interesting. It made the movie seem like a scathing attack on the tobacco industry and the unreflective local economies that are indifferent to the health effects of their cash crop. Instead of being packed with information like other recent documentaries of note like 'Wal-Mart' or Robert Greenwald's body of work, it's 105 minutes with about 90 minutes of padding. The filmmaker is curious about his family's long lost tobacco empire. His family could have grown as big as the Duke family (of Duke Univ. fame), he says, except for unfair Duke competition that ended in his great grandfather's losing a lawsuit to the Duke patriarch a century ago. He and other members of his family still lament this turn of events, and continue to dream of a monstrous fortune they could have inherited. The other main issue that he pursues is whether the Gary Cooper movie 'Bright Leaf' is about his great grandfather or about a different tobacco magnate. Eventually he tracks down ancestors of the book's author for an anticlimactic interview in which they tell him he's been barking up the wrong tree. The lawsuit between the Dukes and his family and who the movie and book 'Bright Leaf' were based on are the two main issues of the film, right up to the end of the movie when he tours a Duke museum and sees reminders of his family's being ripped off by the Duke's in every exhibit. That he chose these two issues to fill a documentary may strike some as somewhat self-important or even self-indulgent. That would be fair. That the cover of the DVD shows a closeup of the filmmaker with his camera is consistent with how much this documentary is about himself and his own ambitions. He even rambles indiscriminately about his filmmaking, trying to defend (unconvincingly) why his shooting technique is so indiscriminate. He explains that much can be learned by just turning on the camera and seeing what it captures. This "technique" leads however to his either reading bizarre lengths into the smallest gesture of his interviewees or just filming... nothing, an empty parking lot even. Funny that he doesn't seem to notice the interviewees experiencing him as a tedious bore. It's a long movie, and somehow he fills it up with melodramatic lamenting of what inheritance could have been his and other boorish monologues. Only when the movie gets edited down to a 3-minute trailer does it really show much promise. If he were a fictional character, and an editor was allowed to have at it, it would not be a half-bad 20-minute satire of southern culture and various moral failings. As is, it's little more than a home video about family history, and is bound to hold little interest beyond the family which it portrays.

This was the least-focused documentary I've ever seen. The interviewees collaborated with McElwee's main theory of a story consciously drawing from his family's history as a square block collaborates with a triangular hole. He had little to nothing to run on with his postulation and substituted shamelessly unrelated, mawkish family scenes for material relevant to his subject. The most critical interviews are too short, overlong, or directly oppose his ideas. Early on in the film I got to thinking, does McElwee cast a negative light on tobacco just because his family lost out on a fortune, and he's pouty about the competitor who defeated his grandfather? My opinion is yes.

McElwee is a bright documentarian. A little slow, but always thoughtful, his style is one that turns dull or unrelatable subject matter into something more personable and at times slightly surreal.

lots of tobacco history; thought-provoking? mind-provoking?

Self-indulgent and overwhelmed by grating narration, but with the occasional addition of a small, interesting historical fact.

Another interesting look at life!!! and death.

Not as good as his others, but still good.

Fascinating, free-form documentary by SHERMAN'S MARCH filmmaker Ross McElwee. Dude is definitely becoming one of my favorite documentarians. He's like Errol Morris with a heart.

Great documentary. There's a fantastic interview with an aging film theorist that blew my mind. Very intriguing. McElwee put this film together expertly.