I visit my grandmother and grandfather in South Carolina about once or twice a year, almost always in the summertime. I don't get around to it as much in recent years as I should. When I was little, they took me to a tobacco auction in this old warehouse where there was a bunch of strange men, all staring at these brown piles of leaves. The smell was pretty awful and the man walking in front of the procession of bidders spoke in a strange, quick cadence. I remember seeing these little cards that the bidders would place on the piles they wanted. I remember seeing the name Phillip Morris, and not more than two days before seeing an anti-smoking commercial on TV from Phillip Morris. I thought maybe they were taking this tobacco so that nobody would ever turn them into cigarettes and so that nobody would die of cancer as my great aunt had only recently. I decided to join the cause. I took a leaf while nobody was watching. A small token, but it made me feel that because of me, maybe one life, or at least one cigarette, could be salvaged.
Looking back, it was a silly thought. I imagine McElwee would also find it a silly ideal. What could one leaf matter when there is a warehouse full in front of me? It is the same futility that McElwee fights against and expresses when he looks back at photos of his father and finds the images are growing foreign to him. We are told that taking a picture preserves our memories forever, but when removed from the context of the here-and-now, they seem less resonant and are almost painfully teasing in their showing us the image without its essence. We cannot stop or even slow time. It marches on before us, despite all our attempts to "capture" it like a lightning bug in a jar.
McElwee's journey here, as always for the filmmaker, is inward. But, the impetus is a 1950 film with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal called Bright Leaf. He is told of the film by his cineast cousin and discovers that the Cooper character may very well be based on his great grandfather who invented the tobacco product Bull Durham and lost in his legal war with the Duke family who ultimate became the tobacco barons of the American south. Throughout, McElwee uses the classic movie as a leaping point for his ruminations and casual, and poignant, reflections on his father. He hopes the movie can give him an understanding of his family. Of course, by the end it is all shown as an illusion, much like McElwee's hoping to forever preserve his father in images. I think, if anything, McElwee illustrates that the best way to capture the essence of his father is through hearing the personal stories of the way he touched others.
Ultimately, the movie parallels itself in the Cooper film. McElwee asserts that the tobacco baron in the Hollywood film must have been a mix of fact and fiction, and the same could be said of McElwee's journey. There is also a strong sense of family heritage, and McElwee makes explicit the parallel stories of his great grandfather who attempted to make himself rich off of tobacco and the fallout which is treated by the procession of three generations of doctors, in particular McElwee's father who treats patients forever scarred by tobacco use. In the end, McElwee is looking for the elusive path to cementing the past through cinema, but much like the emptiness of the unknown little monument park dedicated to his great grandfather, finds that the passage of time and slipping away of the past is a sadly inevitable part of life. And perhaps most poignant of all is the realization of this but the stubbornness to try anyway, much in the same way McElwee hopes to dedicate the film to his son Adrian so he may look back one day and bear witness to the memory of his father and his work.
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