Ross McElwee Takes a Long, Hard Look at His Late Son and Himself in ‘Remake’

Thanks to video-based social-media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, anyone who makes videos could technically be considered a documentary filmmaker these days. Though some influencers clearly put more time and effort into shooting and editing their work, even the most amateur videos exude the classic nonfiction appeal of bearing first-person witness to events. Social media has also enabled many users to obsessively document their own lives, even amid events that many might consider world-changing.

It may be difficult to remember a time when making yourself the focus of a documentary was considered novel. In the 1960s, filmmakers like D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop) and Albert and David Maysles (Salesman, Grey Gardens) pioneered the “direct cinema” approach to nonfiction, in which they took advantage of advances in camera portability to aim as close to nonjudgmental realism as possible. Based on the films they made, the idea of making themselves the subjects of their documentaries seems never to have entered their minds.

Perhaps that’s why Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March had such an impact upon its release in 1986. As he explains early on in his road-trip epic —  newly rereleased in a new 4K restoration currently running at Film Forum in New York — McElwee had intended to make a film about the lingering present-day effects on the South of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea during the Civil War. But a romantic break-up early on in the filmmaking process led him to tilt the film in a more personal direction. While it still retraces General Sherman’s steps as he waged his violent Confederacy-deflating campaign, it also uses that history as the backdrop for a reflection on, among other things, his messy love life.  (Tellingly, the film is subtitled A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation.)

McElwee wasn’t necessarily the first to inject himself into a documentary in this manner; French filmmaker Chris Marker’s classic, similarly subjective docu-essay Sans Soleil, for one, preceded Sherman’s March by three years. Even so, McElwee’s diaristic mixture of autobiography, history, and observation caused a critical and box-office stir upon its release, and was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry in 2000. It also proved extremely influential among a newer generation of nonfiction filmmakers. The more politically oriented onscreen antics of Michael Moore and the late Morgan Spurlock might never have happened without McElwee’s comparably genteel, self-deprecating precedent.

All of that is a preface for Remake, McElwee’s latest and most emotionally wrenching film. As its title indicates, Remake partly revolves around others’ attempts to adapt Sherman’s March into fiction. Initially, Steve Carr — a director whose previous credits include Next Friday, Dr. Dolittle 2, and Paul Blart: Mall Cop — reaches out to McElwee about the possibility of a feature-film adaptation (with Amy Adams floated as a performer of interest for the project), of which he would serve as an adviser. As the project develops, though, the feature is eventually reconceived as a TV sitcom until it’s abandoned altogether (Sherman’s March does get adapted, though, in a delightful manner I won’t spoil here). Inevitably, McElwee’s interest in the project wanes along the way.

The main reason for his increasing disinterest, though, is the slowly unfolding tragedy that underpins the film: the decline of his son, Adrian, before he died of a drug overdose in 2016 at the age of 27. Though McElwee has featured his son in some of his previous films, like Time Indefinite (1993), Six O’Clock News (1997), and Photographic Memory (2011), Remake features clips from those films, so you don’t absolutely need to have seen them to get up to speed. Those older scenes and new footage shot by both Ross and Adrian add up to a portrait of a young adult in freefall, trying to control the bipolar disorder that has possibly led to his opioid addiction. The fact that McElwee had become estranged from his son, a rift he detailed in Photographic Memory, makes Adrian’s eventual demise even more heartbreaking.

Remake is more than just McElwee’s memorial for his late son, however. “I used to consider myself a documentary filmmaker,” McElwee says in his first line of voice-over narration in the film. This new film suggests that Adrian’s personal struggles and eventual death have led McElwee to a full-on self-reckoning. Given Adrian had picked up his father’s penchant for always having a camera on hand and recording just about everything in his life, McElwee starts to wonder whether his filmmaking practice somehow added to his son’s troubles. This strand of interrogating his own methods carries a broader, more contemporary resonance when he presents some of Adrian’s own footage. He apparently aimed to become a financially successful influencer type, with all the careful self-curation that kind of content creation entails.

At what point, though, does being open about your own troubles cross the line into oversharing or, worse, exploitation? McElwee subtly hints at that question through interview footage with the late Charleen Swansea, a former English teacher of his who has been a frequent presence in his films ever since his 1977 debut, Charleen. Though she retains some of the sharpness and color of her previous appearances, in Remake, Charleen is also clearly in the early stages of dementia, which leads to the uncomfortable question of whether McElwee is, however unconsciously, engaging in a form of elder abuse by including her in the film. (Remake is dedicated to both her and Adrian.)

There is a bracing honesty, though, in McElwee’s allowing such questions about potentially unsavory aspects of his documentary approach to linger under the surface. In McElwee’s case, it helps that, unlike stylistic successors like Moore and Spurlock, he exudes a genuine curiosity and sense of exploration toward his subjects, which helps prevent his films from coming off as overly narcissistic. Though many of his films are largely about himself, McElwee always takes the time to get to know the people he interviews onscreen, ceding the spotlight to them and basking in their glories and idiosyncrasies. What makes Remake especially devastating is the spectacle of a filmmaker reckoning with the fact that his most precious tool, the camera, wasn’t enough to get to truly know and maybe even save his own son.