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Bright Leaves

2004, Movie, NR, 107 mins

Bright Leaves: Review

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Native South Carolinian filmmaker Ross McElwee is best known for SHERMAN'S MARCH (1986), a nearly three-hour rumination on love and loss that simultaneously retraces the filmmaker's failed romances and Major General William T. Sherman's scorched-earth trek across the Confederacy. Fifteen years later, McElwee, who now makes his home in Boston, is lured back south by a piece of Hollywood fiction: BRIGHT LEAVES, a 1946 Gary Cooper-Patricia Neal vehicle directed by Michael Curtiz that McElwee's cousin thinks might be based on the story of their great-grandfather, John H. McElwee. Like his rival, James Buchanan Duke, old man McElwee was a penniless Civil War veteran who made his fortune planting bright-leaf tobacco. According to McElwee family lore, Duke stole the formula for John McElwee's Durham Bull Smoking Tobacco and manufactured his own Bull Durham brand. After a series of protracted court cases and ruinous appeals that smacked of Duke family payoffs, McElwee died embittered and bankrupt while Duke built an American empire. Watching BRIGHT LEAF unfold in his cousin's screening room, McElwee has the strange sensation of seeing what he describes as a "surreal home movie reenacted by Hollywood stars"; this leads him to wonder whether it's possible to detect documentary features within high artifice of classic Hollywood melodramas. With the help of a few good friends, including schoolteacher Charleen Swansea and novelist Allan Gurganis, Ross McElwee searches Charlotte, N.C., for traces of his once-powerful family in the long shadows of the grand Duke legacy. As in SHERMAN'S MARCH, this purely historic inquiry soon becomes deeply personal quest: McElwee's admitted Duke-envy is offset by a sense of his own forebears' responsibility for what he terms a "global tobacco addiction" and he explores the effect that John H. McElwee's "agricultural-pathological trust fund" has had on his descendents. Is it any coincidence that each successive generation of McElwees, including the filmmaker's own father, were doctors who treated the dying smokers of Carolina tobacco country? This rich, complex and surprisingly entertaining film also becomes a meditation on filmmaking and the parallels McElwee finds between cinema and, of all things, smoking. Like tobacco, film exudes a narcotic, erotic allure that McElwee feels has the power to stop time, at least momentarily. Through his home movies, McElwee has tried to keep his son a child a while longer and his late father close by his side. In the end, both are equally illusory: Smoking only accelerates our end, and no matter how much footage McElwee shoots, Adrian is already a young man and Dr. McElwee becomes more unreal as time passes, a fading figure no less fictional than Gary Cooper's ruined tobacco tycoon in BRIGHT LEAF. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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