★★★★½
An effort to remake his documentary Sherman’s March as a fiction feature becomes the frame for Ross McElwee’s grief over his late son,
The premise sounds almost like a joke: someone wants to remake Sherman’s March, McElwee’s sprawling 1986 debut, as a fiction feature, with actors playing the man who has spent fifty years insisting his life could only ever be filmed as it was lived. Remake takes that absurd proposition as its spine and lets it do something the title only later reveals in full. The fiction adaptation lurches along, never quite happening, a project about reconstructing the past by hand, and against it McElwee sets the one event that can never be reconstructed: the death of his son Adrian.
The stalled fiction remake, all artifice and casting and second takes, runs alongside decades of home footage in which Adrian grows up in fragments of old tape, and the grief sits between them like a question neither form can answer. Did the camera that documented their relationship also distort it, and now that Adrian is gone, is this archive all that survives of him, or merely proof of how he was watched? For most of its length the film holds these registers in counterpoint, fiction against document, past against present, the living son against the absence where he should be, each timeline interrogating the others. The effect is symphonic, sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant, always alive to its own bad faith. There is a moment where McElwee wonders whether a life lived perpetually on camera gave Adrian a false sense of reality. Few documentaries have been this honest about the violence of the autobiographical impulse, the way the lens can be both love and a refusal to simply be present.
In the final stretch the layering collapses into linear retelling, as McElwee approaches the death directly. There are no real answers here, and the structure that had been generating meaning through juxtaposition, the overlapping of timelines, flattens into chronology. This is natural; such a loss resists analysis, refuses to be metabolised into form, and a lesser film would have imposed a shape the grief cannot honestly bear. The film can only circle what it cannot enter, but that’s life. In any case, Remake drove a stake through my emotions. It is devastating.
Remake played at the SXSW London festival