Filmmaker Ross McElwee awakened to a strange dream of immense prehistoric plants, the air humid with their heat. He decided the leaves were tobacco; his wife added that the dream meant he missed his Southern home, especially those old tobacco fields of North Carolina where his family had lived since the first Europeans landed on those shores.
He went home and made Bright Leaves, a travelogue that rambles down many paths—some of them quite interesting. The hook of this documentary (out on DVD) is McElwee’s discovery, at the home of his classic movie buff cousin, of a Gary Cooper drama called Bright Leaf whose plot seemed to mirror his family’s story. After the Civil War, the McElwees and the Dukes bullied for control over fields of bright leaf, a hardy new strain of tobacco. The Dukes became cigarette kings and one of America’s richest families, endowing a university in their name. Most of the McElwees became physicians in the area, often treating the ravages of cigarettes. Even so, the filmmaker’s grandfather died from smoking.
Investigating the persistence of smoking, McElwee uncovers few bright moments. One of the locals he interviewed started smoking at age four. Even the thirtysomethings who know they are hooked, and know the danger, can’t bring themselves to quit. High school kids joke of stopping “when we’re dying of cancer.” So addictive is the drug that some cancer patients smoked through the end. Mixing irony and elegy, Bright Leaves is a meditation on life, loss and the meaning of a past whose sign posts are uncertain. Was Gary Cooper really playing a fictionalized version of McElwee’s great-grandfather? The evidence he finds in unclear.
