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With Bright Leaves, filmmaker Ross McElwee offers an involved personal history that also functions as a sly commentary on the tobacco industry and the impact it's had on America and the world. McElwee's diary style of filmmaking has been extremely influential, opening the door for festival hits like Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect and Mark Moskowitz's Stone Reader. McElwee's is not an overtly political film. In Bright Leaves, as in earlier works like Sherman's March, his compulsive cinematic chronicling of seemingly every facet of his life leads him to raise certain questions that have far-reaching implications, but the film remains deeply personal. The questions McElwee ponders about the tobacco industry stem from his own family's connection with it, and he approaches the issue in a laid-back, conversational manner with a lot of room for diversions, such as touching meditations on his young son's future and a visit with an eccentric film historian, Vlada Petric, who forces McElwee to sit in a wheelchair and shoot him while he pushes the wheelchair around, rambling on about the importance of kinesthetic movement in cinema. McElwee doesn't pretend to provide answers to the questions he raises. His investigation of an old Hollywood film, Bright Leaf, which resembles a piece of his own family history -- presumably the spark that set him off to make this documentary -- hardly qualifies as a mystery from a narrative standpoint. But in humbly examining the devastating effects of tobacco from a personal perspective, including his own view of addiction, the crop's importance to his native North Carolina's past, and his sense of guilt over his family's past involvement in growing tobacco, McElwee provides a valuable and entertaining look at a kind of shadow history. Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

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