Photo:Amareschal, Creative Commons, Flickr

Bright Leaves, a documentary of North Carolina’s tobacco legacy, is a personal project of filmmaker Ross McElwee. As such, it is part documentary, part home video, part miscellaneous. One’s enjoyment of the film depends largely on the one’s tolerance of McElwee himself, who ranges from moderately funny to distractedly self-absorbed.

The movie seeks to understand how the McElwee family, once the most prominent tobacco manufacturers in the region, lost their fortune to their competitors, the Dukes. In comparing his humble childhood home to the Duke family’s extravagant mansion, our dry narrator observes:

In a way, for me, it’s the worst of both fates. I mean, without reaping any of the financial rewards, I’m free to feel all the guilt I want over the fact that my grandfather, in helping to launch the tobacco industry down here, probably made some measurable contribution to global tobacco addiction.  

McElwee shows how the Dukes have contributed to this addiction with interviews of lung cancer patients in the region, and how they’ve tried to compensate for their damages with the Smoking Cessation Clinic at Duke University Medical Center, where these patients are treated.

There is clearly a disconnect when it comes to tobacco, not only in the minds of the Duke family, but also in the minds of tobacco farmers who see their product as innocuous. Robbie Jackson, a farmer whose mother died of lung cancer, says:

My growing tobacco has nothing to do with my mother dying. It has nothing to do with anyone that dies.

In tracing the history of North Carolina tobacco manufacturing, McElwee spends a considerable amount of time examining the 1950 film “Bright Leaf,” starring Lauren Bacall, Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. Convinced that the movie is based on his grandfather, John Harvey McElwee’s rivalry with Washington Duke, he interviews the screenwriter’s elderly widow, but she denies any parallels.

McElwee loses focus temporarily when he also interviews Patricia Neal, who is visiting North Carolina for a film festival. His questions to her focus exclusively on her relationship with Gary Cooper, which, while potentially interesting, are irrelevant to the documentary.  

It’s a shame that McElwee gets so sidetracked by the Hollywood version of the story, especially since, with slaves featured in almost every scene, the Hollywood version is not a particularly PC choice.

However, despite its digressions, McElwee takes a genuine interest in the people and addiction that characterize his hometown. One that is sympathetic too, considering that McElwee himself is a former smoker who longs for the nicotine feeling that “time had stopped and time would go on forever.”