Bright Leaves
dir. Ross McElwee
First Run Features

It's not necessary to watch Ross McElwee's films in chronological order, but the experience is certainly unique. They arrive infrequently and McElwee can be an easy figure to lose track of. Yet each has the instant familiarity of an old acquaintance renewed. From the start of Bright Leaves, the soft and gentlemanly voice of his narration transports you back to that peculiar McElwee reality. You see familiar faces like the inimitable Charlene, his friend and muse. As always, his subject matter is thoroughly intertwined with his life experience.

A film professor at Harvard since 1986, McElwee is probably best known for his first film, Sherman's March, explained by its subtitle as A Mediation to the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation. His family figures prominently in all his work, dating back to his earliest shorts, and his camera often seems permanently attached to his shoulder. His willingness to bare himself before it can be both astonishing and discomforting, but valuably so. In many ways, McElwee is the ultimate auteur. His creations are entirely his own: He writes, directs, edits and narrates. A one-man camera crew, his work is antithetical to Hollywood techniques and aesthetics. Deft, meditative, compassionate, unscripted, self-obsessed, honest, discursive and methodical — the films are above all personal.

Bright Leaves finds its impetus in the filmmaker's discovery that his great grandfather, a major tobacco manufacturer, may have been the inspiration for an all but forgotten film starring Gary Cooper. Tracing his family history and tobacco manufacture in the South, McElwee compares the pain and death tobacco addiction brings with its entrenched role in local culture and economics — it's the lifeblood of his home state, celebrated with parades and parks.

More a candid look at smoking than a calculated argument against it, Bright Leaves is nonetheless likely to give most smokers pause. The sad tales and ravaged faces of the elderly cancer victims who are interviewed — some of whom are teetering at death's door — convey loss in a way that statistics simply cannot. Interspersed throughout is the chronicle of a happy young couple's ongoing attempts to quit. Their failure, about which they are relatively blasé, is almost more distressing than the fate of the already doomed. Yet there's no mistaking the pleasures inherent in the nicotine habit, which the film openly acknowledges. McElwee never portrays smoking as immoral or quitting as a simple choice. Its allure is in many ways as interesting to him as its downside, a moment exemplified when a friend hilariously recounts having a nic fit halfway through swimming the English Channel.

To claim that Bright Leaves is "about" the tobacco industry, however, would be to display the sort of facile reductionism the film stubbornly resists. The national fascination with the lush but deadly plant is only one of the film's motifs, as McElwee tackles a slew of other topics, including the challenges of parenting, fear of death, addictive guilt and the trials of the documentary method itself. The last is most prominent in a whirlwind exchange between McElwee and the film historian Vlada Petric on the topic. And as in his previous work, the medium serves as a sort of netherworld from which the dead — in particular the filmmaker's father — return both to haunt and comfort. In his phenomenal ability to achieve intimacy with his subjects, McElwee exemplifies the very best of the cinema verité tradition: Courteous and nonjudgmental, he connects remarkably well with his fellow Southerners.

Bright Leaves is also a very funny movie, almost effortlessly so, because it is responsive and doesn't seek to impose. McElwee has a rare eye for the implicitly humorous and knows how and when to bring it forth. When a stray dog wanders into a shot, for example, his attempts to shoo it aren't edited out — these moments keep the film from becoming too grim or self-indulgent.

It's been seven years since the director's last project, the less successful Six O'Clock News. That's a lot of time over which to accumulate footage. You have to wonder if, without a self-imposed limit, he might not go on pursuing a given subject forever. But closure or definitive answers aren't his objective; the process is the thing. Bright Leaves insists, in its open-ended way, that phenomena and ideas are more complex than is generally acknowledged, always colored by subjectivity and only to be fully appreciated in conjunction with individual context. McElwee's boldness in combining so many disparate elements is what makes it so effective. The process is a tricky one, but yields powerful contrasts when it's pulled off.

On a different level, the film partakes in a much grander project: the filmmaker's obsessive documentation of his own life. It may be that he is incapable of ever breaking from this continuity to try something different, but as intriguing as that prospect is, movies like Bright Leaves are accomplishment enough.

— D.W. Young (dwyoung6 at earthlink dot net)