remake

Remake (2025)
Directed by Ross McElwee

A raspier voice. Thinning gray hair on his head and beard. We’re forty years removed from Sherman’s March, the film that introduced me to Ross McElwee and the women who amused, challenged, and became the object of the documentary filmmaker’s lens. Since then much has happened, and chalk it up to my disinterest or simply a lack of distribution, but I had not heard much of McElwee’s documentary filmmaking since. He, for the most part, remained something of a cult figure in my mind, someone who made one of the greatest films of the 80s and disappeared, having composed something so inherently personal and uncompromising that anything to come after would drift past me. But after finding the love of his life in Sherman’s March, the road ahead of him reminded me of some of literature’s great losers: William Stoner from John Williams’ Stoner, Jude from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, or Anton from Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity. Characters marked by some measure of hubris, by expectations of what the world will afford them, and by the crushing realization of life’s constant catastrophes.

Unlike other documentaries of this type (thinking of Kurt Kuene’s 2008 anger-forward Dear Zachary: A Letter to Son About His Father) we’re afforded the truth from the start: Ross’s son Adrian is dead. Archived footage of Adrian as a boy offers insight into the child’s upbringing, as the boy enjoys fishing, painting, and playing with his adopted sister. Scenes from McElwee’s prior documentaries are interspliced throughout Remake, such as In Paraguay (2008), where we see young Adrian integrating with locals while Ross and his wife go through the process of adoption. These sequences have a rather unsettling, two-pronged effect: (1) what tragedy befell Adrian that led to his death and (2) was having a camera recording so much of his childhood and adolescence causing some irreparable harm to the boy, who seems to have his spirit dimmed with every passing year?

Another crucial component to Remake involves Ross confronting the notion of Sherman’s March being adapted as a piece of fiction. He’s contacted by Hollywood producers early in the film who want the rights to produce a movie or possibly a mini-series. Ross is reticent but opts to do it. The reemergence of the film in his consciousness causes Ross to meet up with various individuals from the film, including Charleen, to discuss the implications. It’s these sequences that broaden both our interpretation of Sherman’s March and what it means to be the subject of a documentary filmmaker’s unrelenting gaze: how it functions as a time capsule but also produces something of a fixed, uncompromising state of a false reality.

When Ross meets up with Wini, the nudist PhD in linguistics from Sherman’s March, she mentions how returning to the film produces something of a sense memory, a reminder of a bygone era that functions as a document of the past. But then there’s Charleen, who cannot remember the past, and instead can only recall the times when Ross is away from his camera. She pointedly remarks in Sherman’s March how Ross should put away his camera when meeting new people: “Turn it off! This is important. This is not art; this is life!” In Remake, she makes it clear how she hates the artifice when talking to Ross, “this is such an ugly machine.” Did the ugliness of the machine, of the God that is the camera (an illustration made by a young Adrian has what appears to be a camera on a tripod, where he notes that the image he created is intended to resemble God), overtake Ross’ life and serve to distance him from his family and son, leading to his death?

It’s the question McElwee asks, a jagged little pill of reality, as an onslaught of bad news comes cascading down for Ross. His wife, after over two decades of marriage, is requesting a divorce. Adrian is acting out in high school, drinking and getting suspended for possession of marijuana. The years of filming his family catch up with him, and they greet Ross’ camera with annoyance. An MRI exposes blood deposits in Ross’ brain, and while symptomless, he must proceed with a craniotomy. Soon after he attends a retrospective of his film in Prague, where he views scenes from his wedding; the pain surges throughout him, where the recurring video of his toddler son asking him about marriage haunts him.

McElwee loses Adrian to a fentanyl overdose. It’s a moment of such profound agony, losing your son a day before Christmas, finding their body in your bathroom, and feeling the ache of responsibility. Moments like this are when the weight of loss exceeds documentary filmmaking form and instead functions as a kind of cerebral admission of all-encompassing despair; it’s overwhelming. This is where McElwee’s sensibility is at its most vital, and what makes him such a definitive filmmaker for me: he’s unabashedly himself. The perspective we see throughout Remake and Sherman’s March is Ross. But he relinquishes the reins, and instead provides footage shot by his son, footage that feels like you’re embodying the boy and eventually the man that could never escape the demons of his past. Skiing in Colorado, Ross narrates Adrian’s images, and summons memories of the past that inform the moving picture with resounding humanity and humility.

Was McElwee’s constant filming of his family a causal element to his eventual death? I can’t answer that and I don’t think what’s observed in the film can produce anything resembling a distinct answer. What I saw in Remake was a father mourning his son, and the guilt associated with believing that he may have played a part in it. McElwee is one of those artists that I admire because, well, I too rely on “art” to navigate the trenches of my life. I’ve learned that not everyone does this, so I can understand the hostility in some of his observations. I can understand why a subject might not want to be involved in the catalogue of someone else's life. When I write, it’s often about the women in my life. Often, they don’t realize it’s happening or the stories I recollect and write about have different perspectives that may not align with what they consider to be the capital T “Truth.” The promise I make to myself is to write sincerely, from the heart, and to try to be respectful to those involved. I think Ross does this in a pointed and precise way in Remake; he observes Charleen’s memory loss in such a painful, probing way yet captures her spirit. He’s acknowledging the passage of time, with its joys and anxieties. And he captures his adult son, on the brink of death, with compassion, and with pain. Ross admits to anger surrounding his death - towards the system that allows it, but mostly toward himself - but does not permit himself to be consumed by it. And that’s the difference in form that I think I’m responding to; the aforementioned Dear Zachary was a jostling, high-octane experience that was informed by anger. The works of, say, Frederick Wiseman, so often feel like the camera is invisible. McElwee’s form is how the camera is there, and how we react to it, not as God, not as a judgement, but as an extension of our very human selves; flawed, and incapable of saving those around you, despite hoping that it could.