In 1985, the documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee made Sherman’s March, which was initially supposed to tell the story of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea during the Civil War and the subsequent effect it had on the American South, but which turned into a sprawling tale of McElwee’s own love life and his anxieties, especially regarding the threat of nuclear proliferation.
McElwee’s newest film, Remake, seems to have initially started as a document of a later attempt to adapt Sherman’s March into a fictionalized film, but this, too, ends up being only a little about its ostensible subject. McElwee’s son, Adrian, died in 2016 from an overdose of drugs laced with fentanyl, and what Remake becomes is a father talking directly to his son, the son he can never truly talk to again, and the movie is, itself, a sprawling journey through grief, memory, and McElwee’s anger and guilt about what has happened.
As is typical of McElwee’s work, he provides a constant voiceover with his strong North Carolina accent, and those who’ve seen his earlier films can hear the effect of time and pain on his voice. He has footage from throughout his son’s life, and he stitches that together with scenes from Sherman’s March and of him revisiting some of the people who appeared in his earlier film, much of which adds to this investigation of memory. One of the most colorful characters from Sherman’s March is his old friend Charleen, who now has dementia and while we see she is the same person, she also has no recollection of even being in McElwee’s films. As she says, “Things just disappear. They just disappear.”
Adrian was also interested in filmmaking, and so McElwee has plenty of his son’s footage, too, and when he presents this, we can see just how deeply affected the man is by being able to see the world through his son’s eyes, even if there are things he can never understand. He tells Adrian this through his voiceover as we watch Adrian’s GoPro footage of skiing down a mountain:
“I was mesmerized by your shadow when it floated over the snow. And when you sneezed, it was the same sneeze you made when you were a little kid.”
Remake is deeply sad, but McElwee is too skilled a filmmaker for it to feel punishing. He lays himself bare, and his emotions are raw, but he also knows we are watching, and he’s smart about how he constructs all of this footage to create a past that’s talking to the present, and a present that’s talking to the past. He doesn’t have answers and we can’t expect him to, but at least we can bear witness.
Remake and Sherman’s March are on VOD.
