Bright Leaves
Director: Ross McElwee
Year Released: 2003
Rating: 2.5
Essayist McElwee visits North Carolina to investigate his family's link to the tobacco industry and their rivalry with the famous Duke clan - there are also interludes with film historian/chatterbox Vlada Petric and a brief, uninformative interview with Patricia Neal. It's very good when it stays on target, but McElwee can't always seem keep focus, drifting off in several different directions at once - he's also a passive-aggressive filmmaker (though not as bad as he was in Sherman's March), taking glib shots at some of his subjects and also making broad associations between vignettes to try to tie it all together (smoking cigarettes = passing of time; video tapes of father/son aging = passing of time). Part of me wants to give his technique and worldview the benefit of the doubt; part of me wants to be stubborn and is unsatisfied with McElwee's style. Or maybe I'm just being passive-aggressive, too.
