It has been a rough 14 years for Ross McElwee since he last made a film as we learn from “Remake,” though those that saw his 2011 film “Photographic Memory” might’ve known something bad might’ve been brewing as he retraced the steps he took as a young man wandering the world to attempt to better understand his son Adrian, who seemed adrift in a world where there were too many possibilities. The legendary documentarian confesses he didn’t, at least not to the degree that it warranted the appropriate amount of concern in his mind as he laments Adrian’s death about seven years after it was made and took another seven to process for a new film in which he announces upfront “I used to call myself a filmmaker,” calling into question an entire career behind the camera in which he no longer trusts himself to see the truth.
Although he may be unsure of himself, McElwee proves himself to be quite the filmmaker once again at least as far as pure skill is concerned when in his widely imitated yet completely inimitable personal style he contends with not only considerable loss but all the evidence he has on his hands from collecting footage all these years that can’t entirely seem to do justice to the reality he actually experienced. Of course, he first made his name as a documentarian by introducing the idea of an unreliable narrator into a nonfiction film with his 1985 landmark “Sherman’s March,” offering wry narration to accompany a quest to follow the conquest of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman that went wildly off-course when the concerns of his personal life overtook any professional inquiry, and even before he can announce only a few minutes into “Remake” that his son has died, the film can shake audiences when his familiar North Carolina accent with a pleasing twang is noticeably softer and more resigned, not so much to set a somber tone as much as acknowledge the humbling nature of time passing.
“Remake” is actually pretty buoyant given its subject matter, as McElwee flips back and forth between his own films to reflect an entire life behind the camera, having all the scenes to illustrate key moments as well as the ability to ruthlessly interrogate them now from a distance. When his marriage to Adrian’s mother is now over and he includes all the information he decided to leave out of “Photographic Memory” about Adrian, from a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and the teen’s resulting abuse of various drugs, it’s quite poignant to see McElwee, who once found humor in daring to suggest that filmmakers are human rather than gods in the director’s chair, consider that fallibility more seriously as to when he might censor himself or looks back at scenes he can now see his personal bias in. The worth of his life’s work is up for revaluation when his family would express their discomfort with being filmed all the time and he can also check in with Charleen Swansea, the ever-vivacious Southern dame who’s been a welcome presence in nearly all his films, but age has robbed her of having any recollection of ever appearing in them and she shows no interest in a revisit, seemingly content to live in the moment.
When McElwee’s personal life was previously portrayed as a distraction from the stated intent of his films, “Remake” makes a provocative case that the inverse was true and the director could be too limited by what he saw in his viewfinder to take in a whole picture. Now he fears he’s stuck with only what he captured when anything else can’t be backed up with proof and this is particularly bedeviling in the case of Adrian, where there’s not only the footage he shot of him, but also all the video that Adrian filmed of himself as he made demo reels for skiers and music videos, inching closer to a career like this father has had and all that can be thought about is how much it leaves out. (Inadvertently, this may be the best screen adaptation of David Sheff’s devastating account of his relationship with his son in “Beautiful Boy” in depicting how unconsciously a blind eye forms towards addiction.)
It isn’t just the time that McElwee devoted to his craft that he has to worry may have had a negative impact on Adrian, but his son’s resentment that for all his success, he wasn’t interested in making more commercial films and the film’s title literally refers to a planned fictional remake of “Sherman’s March” that becomes increasingly disenchanting to McElwee as it evolves into a potential sitcom from a feature, but he nonetheless stays in it when it could lead to Adrian getting a foot in the door. It’s a different kind of sacrifice than Adrian couldn’t surely see for himself, just as the film is able to show McElwee come to understand how the act of filming rather than the end result of it could become a common language between the two when they found it difficult to otherwise articulate how they felt about one another. Ironically, as McElwee grows skeptical of his gut instincts, at least one key one serves him well, having made a lasting impact on documentary films when questioning the form and again uses his own experience in a profound new way to show how to keep things alive you have to continually challenge them.
“Remake” will screen again at the Venice Film Festival on September 4th at 5 pm at Sala Volpi and at Astra 2 at 7 pm and 9:30 pm.