Bright Leaves

Making a documentary about one's own family history is inherently risky. While showing home videos and rare artifacts of your departed relatives will certainly resonate with your own personal family, a broader audience will likely lose interest within the first five minutes. Luckily for Ross McElwee, his family history is intertwined in a subject that everybody has some level of an opinion on: the tobacco industry.

The film revolves around McElwee exploring his great-grandfather's legacy, an extremely interesting one that actually inspired a major Hollywood movie. We discover that McElwee's family is essentially responsible for the presence of domesticated tobacco plants in North Carolina, but that a rival company essentially ran the elder McElwee out of business in a rather unfair manner. Tobacco would become a billion dollar industry, but the McElwees wouldn't profit from any of it.

This stunning realization about the origins of the tobacco industry is made extremely relatable through McElwee, who does a good job at conveying both his frustration and his confusion about the subject. He feels cheated in a way, but altogether confused about the merits of such a deadly contribution to society. These contrasting emotions clash throughout the entire movie, and the film does a good job of telling both sides of the story. I would classify it as anti-tobacco without hesitation, but it doesn't skimp away from the appeal. He portrays it extremely honestly, crucial for a documentary.

The film represents a journey for McElwee, albeit an ill-defined one. There's no clear-cut thesis, and he doesn't hold your hand throughout. On one level, I enjoyed this, because it allowed me to make my own conclusions about the nature of tobacco; still, I'm not completely sure what he wanted the audience to take from it. Overall, I found it to be an enjoyable, intelligent, but somewhat ambiguous take on an extremely important subject.