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By Gary Susman
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Bright Leaves, the latest from Sherman’s March documentarian Ross McElwee, finds the Cambridge filmmaker returning once more to his Southern roots, inspired by a bit of family lore suggesting that Bright Leaf, a 1950 melodrama starring Gary Cooper, may have been inspired by his own great-grandfather, John Harvey McElwee, a 19th-century North Carolina tobacco tycoon who lost his fortune and has become a forgotten footnote in regional history. McElwee, who’s made a career out of shooting home movies, is ecstatic to discover what may be a home movie re-enacted by Hollywood A-listers, but in probing the history of his home town, he finds the truth behind the movie to be elusive, even as he enjoys the colorful and often humorous distractions along the way. Like many of his films, Bright Leaves is a personal essay about family, Southernness, and mortality. In noting the paradoxes of tobacco — acknowledging both the pleasure of smoking and its deadly effects, observing that the economic health of the region depends on a product that damages the health of its customers — McElwee finds connections to his own family legacy (after John Harvey, several generations of McElwees became doctors) and to his own work as a filmmaker. He notes that smoking and filmmaking are both activities that seem to arrest the flow of time, however ineffectively. After the generous repast of Sherman’s March and the food for thought of Time Indefinite, Bright Leaves seems like an after-dinner cigarette. It’s a slighter film than McElwee’s others, if no less entertaining. The meditative McElwee has many questions to ask but few answers to offer, only wry and sometimes poignant observations — some found in his own narration or the often clever juxtapositions he creates, others from the wealth of his revealing interviews with eloquent ordinary folk in North Carolina. He may have doubts about the ability of film to stop time or capture truth, but he manages to accomplish both by recording this rich slice of life of regional Americana. (107 minutes) At the Avon on Saturday, May 28 at 3:15 p.m.
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