Product Details

• Actors: Allan Gurganus, Paula Larke, Patricia Neal, Vlada Petric, Charleen Swansea
• Directors: Ross McElwee
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: First Run Features
• DVD Release Date: June 21, 2005
• Run Time: 107 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0008FXT6Y
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #162,361 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Bright Leaves" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

The South is in North Carolina native Ross McElwee's blood, and like his best-known film, Sherman's March, Bright Leaves benefits from what he calls "a transfusion of Southernness." This is McElwee's most accessible autobio-doc since the groundbreaking March put him on the map. His films have ruminated wryly and profoundly on matters of love, family, marriage, and parenthood. In Bright Leaves, an obsession with a 1950 melodrama funds him pondering his family's tobacco-stained history and legacy. The set-up is irresistible: A long-lost second cousin introduces McElwee to Bright Leaf, a film starring Gary Cooper as a tobacco farmer embroiled in a bitter rivalry with a tobacco baron, who destroys him. Is the film a dramatized account of his own great-grandfather's "rise and subsequent fall to ruin"? Turns out old John McElwee created the Bull Durham tobacco brand, only to have it stolen from him by the powerful Duke family, who are considered royalty in McElwee's home town. Visiting the Duke mansion, McElwee can't help but ponder, "If things had gone differently, this would have all been mine."

But Bright Leaf is merely a starting point. McElwee wrestles with his "guilt over the global tobacco addition" in which his ancestors played a role. He notes the irony that later descendants all became doctors, and treated those ravaged by smoking. McElwee interviews relatives about his great grandfather, as well as modern-day tobacco farmers, current smokers (one engaged couple cannot make good on their pledges to quit), and cancer patients (fans of McElwee's films will be delighted to be reunited with Charleen, McElwee's former teacher). McElwee is the anti-Michael Moore. He is a kinder, gentler interviewer, and not at all confrontational. He has no agenda. As for Bright Leaf, he does manage to interview actress Patricia Neal, who was in the film, and the widow of the film's screenwriter, who gives McElwee a definitive answer. Along the way, there are several "stranger than fiction incidents," such as a visit to a former McElwee tobacco warehouse that now serves as a beauty school, and an interview with film theorist Vlada Petric, who, instead of being filmed seated in a movie theatre, insists that McElwee shoot him while Petric pushes him around in a wheelchair rigged to facilitate a tracking shot. --Donald Liebenson

Product Description

McElwee family legend has it that the Hollywood melodrama "Bright Leaf" starring Gary Cooper as a 19th century tobacco grower, is based on filmmaker Ross McElwee's great-grandfather, who created the Bull Durham brand. Using this legacy as a jumping off point, McElwee reaches back to his roots in this wry, witty rumination on American history, the tobacco business, and the myth of cinema.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Documentary, January 30, 2007

By 

J. Williams - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bright Leaves (DVD)

This is a wonderful documentary for those that like subjective and exploratory filmmaking. If you are looking for a point, or say a dummy's guide to attacking the tobacco industry or an expose, watch the nightly news. Bright Leaves is in the same vein as Stone Reader, in that both documentaries incorporate their filmmakers. While some may view this as narcissistic or unnecessary, more is revealed about human understanding and the implications of history than a selection of the facts.

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Boring, Pointless Film, October 7, 2009

By 

stoic (Mobile AL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Bright Leaves (DVD)

Bright Leaves is mess. Filmmaker Ross McElwee returns home to North Carolina and begins to investigate his family's past involvement in the tobacco industry. As the film progresses, we find out that the McElwees were run out of the tobacco business by the evil Duke family and that Hollywood later made a movie, "Bright Leaf" about the family's battle with the Dukes.

The biggest problem with this film is that McElwee doesn't grasp the fact that a film should tell a story. He reports on:
- the tobacco industry,
- his relationship with his son,
- his feelings about the South,
- his family's trips to the beach,
- the film "Bright Leaf,"
- the Duke family, and
- many, many other topics.
Any of these threads might have made for an interesting film. As it stands, however, McElwee briefly comments on each of them before moving on to another topic. Bright Leaves has no center; it is like watching a series of vignettes on different topics.

While some of the material is interesting, much of it is a bore. One of the worst moments is an excruciating, bizarre scene in which McElwee interviews a visiting film scholar. The scene goes on forever and I cannot convey the level of boredom the viewer endures while listening to these two discuss the "kinesthetic" qualities of film.

After the movie, my wife commented that it was like watching a movie by a film student who has yet to learn much. That's a good summary. Do yourself a favor and skip McElwee's self-indulgent, pointless film.

3 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Could've been a decent short, January 1, 2006

By 

Charles (Jersey City, NJ, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bright Leaves (DVD)

This movie's trailer was very interesting. It made the movie seem like a scathing attack on the tobacco industry and the unreflective local economies that are indifferent to the health effects of their cash crop. Instead of being packed with information like other recent documentaries of note like 'Wal-Mart' or Robert Greenwald's body of work, it's 105 minutes with about 90 minutes of padding.

The filmmaker is curious about his family's long lost tobacco empire. His family could have grown as big as the Duke family (of Duke Univ. fame), he says, except for unfair Duke competition that ended in his great grandfather's losing a lawsuit to the Duke patriarch a century ago. He and other members of his family still lament this turn of events, and continue to dream of a monstrous fortune they could have inherited.

The other main issue that he pursues is whether the Gary Cooper movie 'Bright Leaf' is about his great grandfather or about a different tobacco magnate. Eventually he tracks down ancestors of the book's author for an anticlimactic interview in which they tell him he's been barking up the wrong tree.

The lawsuit between the Dukes and his family and who the movie and book 'Bright Leaf' were based on are the two main issues of the film, right up to the end of the movie when he tours a Duke museum and sees reminders of his family's being ripped off by the Duke's in every exhibit. That he chose these two issues to fill a documentary may strike some as somewhat self-important or even self-indulgent. That would be fair. That the cover of the DVD shows a closeup of the filmmaker with his camera is consistent with how much this documentary is about himself and his own ambitions. He even rambles indiscriminately about his filmmaking, trying to defend (unconvincingly) why his shooting technique is so indiscriminate. He explains that much can be learned by just turning on the camera and seeing what it captures. This "technique" leads however to his either reading bizarre lengths into the smallest gesture of his interviewees or just filming... nothing, an empty parking lot even. Funny that he doesn't seem to notice the interviewees experiencing him as a tedious bore.

It's a long movie, and somehow he fills it up with melodramatic lamenting of what inheritance could have been his and other boorish monologues. Only when the movie gets edited down to a 3-minute trailer does it really show much promise. If he was a fictional character, and an editor was allowed to have at it, it would not be a half-bad 20-minute satire of southern culture and various moral failings. As is, it's little more than a home video about family history, and is bound to hold little interest beyond the family which it portrays.