Aside from the late Jonas Mekas, Boston-based director Ross McElwee is probably the best-known practitioner of the diary film. For nearly 50 years, McElwee has been documenting the business of his daily life and, like Mekas, he has thematically organized those quotidian fragments and arranged them into coherent cinematic statements. Unlike most diary filmmakers, however, McElwee had a bit of a breakout hit in 1985 with Sherman’s March, a film that began as an ostensible travelogue and evolved into a sort of nonfiction Woody Allen film. As McElwee traveled through the South retracing Gen. William Sherman’s path of destruction, he kept meeting unusual Southern women and becoming infatuated with them. While McElwee’s later films were more clearly organized by social and political matters — such as Six O’Clock News (1997), about people whose personal circumstances made them unexpectedly newsworthy, or Bright Leaves (2003), about McElwee’s family history as tobacco moguls — Sherman’s March set the template for McElwee’s awkwardly autobiographical filmmaking. Located on a spectrum somewhere between Nick Broomfield’s citizen-journalism and Caveh Zahedi’s insufferable narcissism, McElwee has managed to locate a kernel of narrative entertainment in the day-to-day, partly because he is a compelling character. Shy, honest, and frequently overwhelmed by life’s demands, McElwee comes across as an everyman in the form of a reserved Southern gentleman.
But of course, one of the pitfalls of making yourself the subject of your art is the fact that even the most well-curated life contains unexpected surprises. Remake, McElwee’s first film in 14 years, is primarily about the death of his 27-year-old son, Adrian, from a fentanyl overdose. Like everyone in McElwee’s family, Adrian has been a major character in the diary films over the years, and Remake is in part a director’s reckoning with all the things he should have seen through his camera but was perhaps too close to notice. Addressed to Adrian, Remake is a father’s apology and his struggle to understand what went wrong. It’s an impulse shared by anyone who has lost a loved one under unnatural circumstances. But McElwee’s gift and curse is that he has collected years’ worth of audiovisual evidence of his role as a father and his troubled relationship with his son. Remake begins with footage of Ross and Adrian on a fishing trip when the latter was no more than five years old. Across Remake and McElwee’s other films, we watch Adrian grow up, 7 Up-style, becoming a young man with dreams but no clear plan for executing them, someone prone to binge drinking and smoking weed and, eventually, heroin.
Given the subject matter of Remake, it’s impossible not to be moved by it. McElwee’s pain saturates every frame, and is made even more poignant by his attempts to keep his agony at bay. McElwee’s once wry, jocular presence is now muted with confusion and regret, as well as the filmmaker’s attempt to, in his own words, keep Adrian alive by watching and working with this footage. Adrian also had ambitions of becoming a filmmaker, and so quite a lot of what we see in Remake is shot by the director’s son — skiing and skateboarding footage, silly camera tests, and his own private diary that sometimes runs parallel to Ross’s own. Adrian featured prominently in McElwee’s 2011 film Photographic Memory, and we see Adrian accompanying his father on film festival trips around the globe. Remake emphasizes this paradoxical closeness and distance between father and son. Even as Ross worked to bring Adrian into his world, he remained profoundly inaccessible, lost in his own private turmoil.
At the same time, there is something rather disturbing about Remake’s organization and its secondary themes. The title comes from a plan that never came to fruition. Director Steve Carr (Paul Blart: Mall Cop) optioned Sherman’s March in order to remake the film as a meta-fiction. Over the course of Remake, we watch this project fall apart, going from feature film to limited HBO series to sitcom, until finally the option elapses with nothing to show for it. The proposed remake was a point of contention between Ross and Adrian, the former being skeptical about “selling out” while the latter insisted that it was time for his father to make a “real movie,” instead of whatever it is he’d spent his life doing. Despite their very different points of view on the project, this Sherman’s March remake feels like a rather inappropriate B-plot in a film about the death of one’s own child. Whenever it comes up again, Remake feels almost glib, and in a way, this might be the point. In the face of profound grief, the ordinary business of living can feel vaguely obscene, and still we have to carry on. But the way McElwee frames it in Remake, it feels almost symptomatic of the pathologies that may have contributed to Ross’s alienation from his son. It is sadly common for men to fixate on our careers to the exclusion of our families, but most of us don’t produce such an incriminating record. The grim undercurrent of Remake is McElwee’s fervent desire to have Adrian back and try to do it all again. Sadly, that is yet another option that has permanently elapsed.
Published as part of Venice Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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