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North Carolina’s most famous novelist, Thomas
Wolfe, once wrote that the most romantic notion was not “the desire to escape life,
but to prevent life from escaping you.” It’s
a sentiment with which North Carolina’s most famous documentary filmmaker, Ross
McElwee, would probably agree. Indeed,
McElwee at times seems incapable of putting down his 16mm camera, for fear of letting some
vital moment of life escape capture—even if it proves a clumsy third wheel on the odd
blind date or, in the case of 1994’s Time Indefinite, a massive distraction at his
own wedding.
Ross McElwee makes movies about Ross McElwee, which somehow manage to
spiral out towards universal concerns like mortality and existence in a way that’s
quite comforting. Since he virtually invented
the first-person film essay with 1986’s Sherman’s March, he’s remained one
of its most reliable avatars. With an off-camera persona that’s both self-deprecating
and amiable, his presence as narrator and interlocutor grounds each of his films in a warm
candor that makes interviewees offer up their lives and stories gladly, it would seem. It helps that he knows a good thing when he’s
got one, which explains why Charleen Swansea, the director’s former teacher and close
friend, turns up again and again in his movies. And
though he’s lived in Boston for most of his adult life, McElwee remains drawn to the
south; his journeys home to see friends and family often mark the beginnings or endings of
films. In some respects, his films are
chapters in the ongoing work in progress that is his life. Where
Sherman’s March zeroed in on his bumbling
quest for true love, Time Indefinite and Six O’Clock News deal in married life and
the concerns of fatherhood.
Bright Leaves, the next
installment in the series, is about aging and legacy, so it’s fitting that it finds
the director moving outside of himself. He
discovered a dusty old print of Bright Leaf, a Hollywood melodrama whose plot
echoes a long-standing McElwee family legend; his own grandfather was a wealthy tobacco
baron until the patriarch of the Duke family (yes, that
Duke) allegedly stole the business out from underneath him. By
unraveling the tangled skein of his family’s involvement in North Carolina’s
tobacco heritage, McElwee is able to free-associate on health, wealth (he notes with a
smirk that there is no McElwee University to this day) and the nature of addiction.
It is this last element that underscores once again McElwee’s
prevailing obsession as camera-operator (Bright
Leaves sees the director taking on some help behind the camera; to promote father-son
bonding, he takes his son on as sound man.) A
non-smoker, McElwee’s examination of tobacco culture shows concern but not
condescension, and his description of the seductions of smoking finds a parallel in the
way he shoots his beloved home state. From
Winston-Salem’s manufacturing plants to the old money of Durham’s Tobacco Road,
to the tiny plot of grass where his great-grandfather’s factory once stood—now
dubbed McElwee Park—his camera always manages to find the human element buried under
the sediment of history. Another volume in
his ongoing chronicle of life in the New South, Bright
Leaves is further proof that what we pass on from generation to generation is
something intangible, even if—to cop another phrase from Wolfe—you can’t go
home again.
- Jesse Paddock
