As a filmmaker who’s always philosophizing about his family, his southern heritage, and the meaning of life, Ross McElwee can get a little high-flown at times. The funniest shot in the latest installment of his autobiographical saga, Bright Leaves, brings him down to earth a bit—and shows that McElwee actually may have learned something from the deflation. The shot occurs toward the end of the film and there are several reasons it’s so funny.
(4) Both takes come right after the most deflationary moment for McElwee in the film. Up to this point his central premise has been that Bright Leaf, a 1950 Gary Cooper feature about a 19th-century tobacco baron, was based on the life of McElwee’s great-grandfather John, who developed the Bull Durham brand in North Carolina, then got cheated out of his fortune by his main competitor, James Buchanan Duke. The scene with the dog comes right after McElwee visits the elderly widow of Foster FitzSimons, the man who wrote the source novel for Bright Leaf, and she tells him that her late husband didn’t base it on a real-life story, John McElwee’s or anyone else’s. “I can promise you it ain’t so,” she insists.
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McElwee was once a smoker, briefly when he was younger, and he still feels “slightly tempted” by the “kind of trance state” smoking produces, a state he compares more than once to the one induced by watching a film—but that proves somewhat incidental to his research. More relevant may be his family history: he comes from a family of physicians, and he explores the parallel legacies of his father and grandfather, who treated the physical ravages of tobacco use, and of his great-grandfather, who sought to make a fortune from tobacco. The parallel themes of success and failure in the McElwee and Duke families seem quintessentially American and not merely southern, as does the “success” of having one’s life ratified by a movie—a notion that’s never far from this movie’s core.
Dear Jonathan,
Directed and Written by Ross McElwee
