We started watching Bright Leaves only to see what Ross McElwee, director of the splendid Sherman's March, was up to in 2003. And also because it was about North Carolina...! (...you know, the naive excitement of seeing in film what one is used to see with bare eyes, the desire to have a memorial of one's surroundings...) I started it with no expectations (I thought it was going to be a moralizing anti-smoking pamphlet) and it turned out to be one of my favorite documentaries. Bright Leaves starts with Ross McElwee's dream of gigantic prehistoric plants that he realizes are the tobacco plants of the landscape of his childhood. That ancestral plant is Ross' (and the land's) figure of nostalgia, the need to know and commemorate one's past, which in this case is the struggle between the McElwee and the Duke families for the control over the growth and manufacture of tobacco. The ancestral plant is constant in dreams and the unconscious, and the struggle is constant in the present through the cigarettes that are constantly smoked, a legacy object, a present from the past that denies the present, having the magical quality of suspending time for the smoker. This archetypal gift is a double-edged sword, the suspension of time is the lure that hides the history of the land corroding its way into the body. The promise of the pause is lethal because it's easy, as easy as to engage in the logic of consumption. Bright Leaves shows both the pleasure and the devastating power of tobacco: people who were dying, people who were dead because, as Sharlene says, "they committed suicide through cigarettes." Another fabulous aspect of this film is that the story of the family struggle is constantly paralleled with Bright Leaf, a 1950 drama in which Gary Cooper plays a role that might have been inspired in Ross' great-grandfather. Ross shows us how fiction can be used as a tool to discern reality. By making the film partially be a documentary on a fictional story, McElwee produces a reversal of the documentary, which in this case is not a non-fictional narrative extracted from reality, but an attempt to discern the reality of the past embedded in a fictional story.