Bright Leaves

Admitting little distinction between making movies and living life, the documentarian McElwee remains best known for ‘Sherman’s March’ (1986), in which a retracing of General William T Sherman’s tear through the American South during the Civil War doubled as a rumination on the women who have travelled in the director’s romantic orbit. In his first production since ‘Six O’Clock News’ (1996), the Boston-based director returns to his native North Carolina, and as in ‘Sherman’s March’, he links a calamitous South-specific event – in this case, the advent of the tobacco industry – to a more personal investigation.

Here, McElwee meets his second cousin John, a film buff who believes that the 1950 Gary Cooper vehicle ‘Bright Leaf’, based on a Foster Fitz-Simons novel, was inspired by their great-grandfather, who earned and lost a fortune in tobacco. McElwee laments the riches that might have been his own, as well as the suffering and grief wrought by his ancestor’s cancer-stick technology; he wonders aloud if ‘Bright Leaf’ might be a ‘cinematic heirloom, a kind of surreal home movie re-enacted by Hollywood stars’. McElwee’s theory of Tinseltown melodrama as secret documentary receives little support, however, in interviews with Cooper’s co-star Patricia Neal and Fitz-Simons’s ninetysomething widow; elsewhere McElwee chats with smokers, ex-smokers, and I’ll-quit-as-soon-as-x-happens smokers, while his lens caresses those infernally beautiful fronds of the title. Mordant and melancholy, ‘Bright Leaves’ testifies to the ways that cinema writes our lives, and vice versa.