Bright Leaves

Ross McElwee’s films are all of a piece -- meandering, ruminative, first-person visual essays -- and this new one is up to par, if not quite at the level of Sherman’s March or Six O’Clock News. He always spirals outward from a personal theme, and generally follows a homebound path. He’s taught for decades at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, but he’s still a North Carolinian at heart, and here returns to his beloved home state to tease out the implications of its, and his family’s, long association with tobacco. Following his usual modus operandi, he ricochets from scene to scene, following his pinball train of thought. His old friend and teacher Charlene makes her obligatory appearance, and continues to amuse. He mingles home movie footage of both his father and son, but he’s really on the quest for his great-grandfather’s story, a tobacco grower who invented the Bull Durham formula but then was driven out of business by James B. Duke, or more particularly to find out whether his ancestor was the model for the Gary Cooper character in a 1950 Michael Curtiz film, Bright Leaf. McElwee tracks down co-star Patricia Neal, who divulges that Cooper was the love of her life, but not whether the character was based on the McElwee patriarch. He also goes around in circles with Harvard film theorist Vlada Petric, but mainly focuses on his hometown neighbors’ tangled history with the weed, especially patients of the three generations of McElwees who became surgeons, with their own perspective on the heritage of tobacco. Ross is always on the outlook for the documentary aspects of feature films, and the entertaining and illuminative aspects of documentary recording, and this go-round is continuously amusing and thought-provoking, if somewhat parochial in its approach to larger themes. (2004, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-79, RT-85.)