Bright Leaves (2003, Ross McElwee) (Patreon)

72/100

Second viewing, last seen at NYFF '03. This was my introduction to McElwee (saw Sherman's March a couple of years later), yet from the first few minutes it felt—as with Varda in The Gleaners and I—as if I were checking in with a longtime close friend. Still the case. His slightly doleful voiceover narration ("This small hound, which came out of nowhere, has ruined the shot") creates a remarkable sense of intimacy, and I'm a sucker for artists expressing doubts about their work within the work itself, even when it's obvious that they're only being as candid as their persona and/or concept and/or comfort level dictates. Unlike Gleaners, which roams all over the place in a charming but extremely haphazard way, Bright Leaves pulls a deft bait-and-switch, using his family's possible connection to Bright Leaf—a 1950 Curtiz film (still unseen by me) with Gary Cooper in the role of a tobacco baron—as the bridge between dueling meditations on smoking and cinema. The latter thread continually asserts itself, as McElwee wanders into poignant digressions about the futility of attempting to preserve the past on celluloid; despite all his efforts, he finds that even permanently captured memories are as ephemeral as cigarette smoke, without ever quite explicitly making that precise comparison. Springboards into our collective unknown future, too, via the friends who keep making firm plans to quit only to repeatedly decide that now's not the time. That one of his cousins collects vintage Hollywood posters, trailers and prints (claiming to possess, for example, the sole extant copy of DeMille's Madam Satan) is the kind of too-good-to-be-true happenstance that any personal-essay doc needs to luck into, but credit McElwee for securing entertainingly unproductive interviews with the widow of the guy who wrote Bright Leaf (the novel from which the film was adapted), a game but clearly perplexed Patricia Neal (who costarred with Cooper alongside Lauren Bacall), and crazed film theorist Vlada Petrić, demonstrating in the goofiest way possible his conviction that it ain't really cinematic unless you're constantly moving around.