BRIGHT LEAVES -------------
A dream about prehistoric plants is interpreted by documentarian Ross McElwee's ("Sherman's March") wife as a desire to return to his Southern home. McElwee leaves Boston for North Carolina where he visits a movie mad cousin, John, and makes a startling discovery - an obscure 1950 Michael Curtiz film, "Bright Leaf" starring Gary Cooper, seems to chart the life of his great-grandfather, who created Bull Durham tobacco but lost everything to the rival Duke family. McElwee's exploratory film takes a personal look at the historical, financial and psychological aspects of having roots in the deadly "Bright Leaves."
Echoing several of his past personal profiles, McElwee's new film measures guilt and desire in light of the tobacco industry. Accompanied once again by former high school teacher, the effervescent Charleen, McElwee ruminates on what it would have been like to have the fortune of the Duke family. Clearly, the filmmaker is angered that his grandfather's rival purportedly stole his tobacco blend, and the Dukes's 52 room mansion is contrasted with the parking lot that used to house his grandfather's own. McElwee tries to feel pride in McElwee Park, sitting on one of its two benches expectantly, but clearly few people even know of its existence.
But death hovers over this missed heritage and the filmmaker takes pride in the irony that his great-grandfather begat three generations of doctors, even if the first died of cancer from smoking. McElwee contemplates his own choice of career and then melds all three subjects by taking his own 12-year old son to act as sound man to interview a cancer patient being cared for by a doctor friend. He finds a woman who sees no connection between her own tobacco farming and the death of her mother from cancer and charts the unsuccessful attempts of a couple of friends to quit smoking.
But filmmaking is McElwee's addiction and as he meanders around his interconnected subject threads he throws in small moments that are included only because something in them delighted him - a small bit of his son on a beach, an outtake where a dog ruins a bit of his onscreen narration. Oddly, these detours never seem self-indulgent, just the flights of fancy of a creative intellect. Kismet crosses his path with that of former Harvard Film Archive curator, filmmaker Vlada Petric, who deconstructs "Bright Leaf" while exposing the mechanics of McElwee's own document. Another bit of good fortune finds "Bright Leaf" costar Patricia Neal at a local film festival - she agrees to speak to the director but offers little but the confirmation that Gary Cooper was the love of her life, dismissing McElwee's theory that the behavior of actors can be a documentary within a Hollywood film (McElwee has previously given a shot by shot analysis of how Neal raises, then withdraws her hand from Cooper during an embrace).
The very vibrant ninety-plus widow of "Bright Leaf" author Foster FitzSimons assures McElwee that the story could not have been based on his grandfather, but the idea has already taken too strong a hold. McElwee needs to find his own history not in cigarettes, but on the silver screen.
B
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