Customer Reviews

Bright Leaves

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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.

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.

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.