February 10-16, 2005

movies

Moving Pictures

man with a movie camera: Ross McElwee surveys his family's tobacco-stained legacy in Bright Leaves.

No matter how he films it, Ross McElwee can't get time to stand still.

by Sam Adams

Ross McElwee doesn't open his films with the credit "a film by," or even "directed by." In a simple font against a black background, they read simply "by Ross McElwee." It's less a possessory credit than a title page, establishing centrality but not ownership, as if McElwee were not the creator of images but the one temporarily assigned to whip them into shape. A Northern neurotic in a Southerner's body, McElwee has been wrestling with the stuff of life for more than a quarter-century, struggling primarily with his own life as if nothing else could be understood without first understanding himself.

Bright Leaves, the seventh in McElwee's series of autobiographical documentaries (he has made a few on other subjects), takes the author back to his native North Carolina for what he, in his running voiceover, calls "my periodic infusion of Southernness." But if McElwee's return to his home turf unearths fond memories of youth, the distance between those moments and the present starts him thinking about the far end of life. The movie seems to have an inordinate number of scenes set in cemeteries, to say nothing of its fondness for crumbling ruins and expiring traditions.

McElwee is too instinctive and dilatory a filmmaker for his films' overt subjects to hold for long, but Bright Leaves' ostensible focus is the legacy of tobacco, the "agricultural pathological trust fund" bequeathed to North Carolina by the tobacco barons who created a thriving industry and a global health hazard at the same time. (Oddly, the movie contains only a fleeting reference to the slaves who allowed the industry to flourish.) McElwee learns that one of those indutrialists is his great-grandfather, which triggers twin, opposing regrets: one, that his family is connected to the problem of tobacco addiction, and two, that the family fortune was squandered before he could inherit some of it. Touring Charlotte, a city devoted to James Buchanan Duke, the man who drove his great-grandfather out of business, McElwee is seized with regret. His happy childhood home seems like a dilapidated shack compared to the Duke family's antebellum mansions just a few blocks away. As his friend and frequent co-star Charleen Swansea teasingly remarks, it looks like "Buck Duke's outhouse."

There is hope yet for the McElwee family's posterity, in the form of a movie. Not McElwee's, but a Hollywood melodrama called Bright Leaf, starring Gary Cooper as an imperious tobacco baron brought low by a devious opponent, a man whose life closely parallels that of McElwee's ancestor. Here, McElwee hopes, will be his family's vindication. Not a gravestone knocked askew by a careless lawnmower or a vacant quadrangle with a splintered sign reading "McElwee Park," but a real live Hollywood movie. The Duke family may have their own university, but do they have Gary Cooper?

In viewing Bright Leaf as "a kind of surreal home movie," McElwee begins to wonder if it might serve the same function for others, specifically Patricia Neal, who co-starred with Cooper in the midst of their passionate five-year affair. Might not the gesture Neal's hand makes as she kisses Cooper, tentatively reaching, then falling back, convey something of her private longing for her co-star? Neal, whose Kentuckian pragmatism is less diluted than McElwee's, brushes off the idea when McElwee manages to track her down, but she calls Cooper "the love of my life," despite the fact that she married another. McElwee's notion that fiction films contain traces of documentary reality might seem like a film school construct, but how likely is it that Neal, kissing the man she loved, would betray no trace of genuine emotion? Does the camera capture only what the person behind it means to film, or what those in front mean to show, or does it penetrate indiscriminately, sometimes catching only surface, sometimes the most subterranean emotions?

"What do we leave behind?" McElwee muses, wondering not just about his family's legacy but the legacy, even the validity, of his life's work. The images of his late father (drawn from his film Backyard) become less real as time goes on; rather than fixing memory in place, they serve only to chart its degradation. A young couple enlist McElwee to film them as they vow to quit smoking; three months later, cigarettes in hand, they repeat the pledge. Time slips away, promises fade, and the camera does nothing to slow the process.

For McElwee, filmmaking is a cross between ritual and addiction, a relationship he pointedly likens to that between smoker and cigarette. In the way smoking heightens the awareness of each breath, each moment experienced through the viewfinder slows and recombines with other moments, so they overlap and intermingle like, yes, smoke. To watch Bright Leaves is to be reminded of how such moments can be at once eternal and evanescent, like a single frame flickering in the projector's light. Slowing down but never stopping, McElwee's images move inexorably forward toward the moment when they fade to black.

Bright Leaves Directed by Ross McElwee A First Run Features release Opens Friday at Ritz East recommended