Ross McElwee's trip down tobacco road

It does occur to me, to put it quite bluntly, that if things had gone slightly differently this would’ve been all mine. I mean, I’d now be sitting on top of an enormous family fortune. Duke University would be known as McElwee University…"

If all you knew about Ross McElwee’s documentary, Bright Leaves, was its premise—a filmmaker discovers that his tobacco baron great-grandfather was driven to bankruptcy by James B. Duke—you might think the documentary would be anti-Duke. That assumption, however, could not be further from the truth. Bright Leaves isn’t interested in rewriting history, nor is it interested in simply rehashing history. Instead the documentary reveals how the past informs the present and, in turn, how the present gradually retreats into the way things once were. Ken Burns this is not.

The forgotten feud between John Harvey McElwee and James B. Duke, and the 1950 Gary Cooper melodrama Bright Leaf that it may or may not have inspired, simply act as the context through which these greater philosophical questions are refracted and examined.

As McElwee travels through North Carolina illuminating his great-grandfather’s legacy by tracing his declining fortune, the filmmaker simultaneously traces the declne of the tobacco industry’s credibility and reputation.

This dramatic change of fortune is the most strongly suggested when McElwee turns his camera on Durham. While today Durham is recognized as home to one of the most prestigious universities and hospitals in the world, the fact is that Durham’s original national and global prominence was of a completely different nature. Durham is now known as the “City of Medicine,” but the city’s tobacco legacy still weighs heavily. In many ways, Durham is a ghost town, and as the chronic emptiness of downtown can attest, the deindustrialization of Durham, in both tobacco and textiles, is a loss from which the city has yet to fully recover.

Bright Leaves, however, is not a political film. Rather, it is within political concerns that McElwee exorcises personal questions. He is also startlingly conscious of the power of film, particularly how filmic representation can skew our understanding of reality. It is a testament to his gifts as a filmmaker that McElwee can strike a balance between the political, the personal and the power of film to create a work that is thoughtful, critical and indulgent, but never over-bearing, propagandistic or downright mean.

The real tie that binds Bright Leaves to Duke and Durham is the legendary Bull Durham tobacco brand. The filmmaker’s great-grandfather and Buck Duke fought over the rights to this trademark for several years, driving the elder McElwee to ruin. Evidence of the tobacco brand’s imperative role in Durham’s history can most readily be found today in the city’s minor league baseball team, the Durham Bulls. In fact, Bull Durham tobacco has made a few other contributions to America’s game, allegedly serving as the basis behind both the phrase “shooting the bull,” something often done in the “bullpen.”

In spite of the vast web of historical and political connections in which McElwee gets caught, the legacy he most vividly illuminates is his own, or rather, our own. In the dual examination of old footage of both his father and his son woven throughout the film, McElwee demonstrates the simultaneous pleasure and disappointment inherent in recorded memory. “As time goes by my father is beginning to seem less and less real to me in these images, almost a fictional character. I want so much to reverse this shift, the way in which the reality of him is slipping away,” McElwee narrates.