Bright Leaves (2004)

Admitting scanty repute between making movies and living life, the documentarian McElwee remains best known for ‘Sherman’s March’ (1986), in which a retracing of Extended William T Sherman’s rift through the American South during the Civil War doubled as a rumination on the women who take travelled in the director’s romantic orbit. In his first casting since ‘Six O’Clock News’ (1996), the Boston-based director returns to his tribal North Carolina, and as in ‘Sherman’s March’, he links a calamitous South-particular event – in this proves, the advent of the tobacco industry – to a more personal inquiry.

Here, McElwee meets his encourage cousin John, a film buff who believes that the 1950 Gary Cooper vehicle ‘Bright Leaf’, based on a Foster Fitz-Simons creative, was inspired by their great-grandfather, who earned and gone by the board a fortune in tobacco. McElwee laments the riches that ascendancy have planned 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 current in movie re-enacted by Hollywood stars’. McElwee’s theory of Tinseltown melodrama as secret documentary receives microscopic foundation, however, in interviews with Cooper’s co-leading light 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 magnificent fronds of the rubric. Mordant and glumness, ‘Bright Leaves’ testifies to the ways that cinema writes our lives, and vice versa.

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