“Cinema is death at work,” Jean Cocteau used to say. He was talking about the way it captures time, the fact that faces onscreen age before our eyes, even if over the span of a few seconds. But there was also this: Cinema has a way of fixing things in time, transforming three-dimensional experience into two-dimensional images, effectively turning life into something else, something closer to an object. That is its dreadful beauty. Early on in Remake, Ross McElwee’s documentary about the life and death of his son, Adrian, the director says he has been watching pieces of film he shot of his child over the years. “I look at this footage to convince myself that you were alive,” he says, addressing his son, “but also to convince myself that you’re gone.”
Remake is a tough watch, as you may imagine, a thoroughly devastating movie. Its power obviously comes from the tragedy at its heart but also from the many-faced, forever-questioning thing McElwee makes of it. A pioneer of the “personal documentary” (a term he has bristled at), the director has built a career out of filming his life, often interweaving episodes from his experiences into beautifully rambling meditations on history and society. His signature feature, the magnificent Sherman’s March (40 years old this year and being rereleased in a 4K restoration), began life as a documentary about the Civil War and wound up being about the director’s complicated efforts at romance, albeit with the Civil War still in there somewhere. Over the years, Adrian had been a growing presence in the films, first as a sweet and precocious child seen in brief glimpses and eventually as a young man with addiction and mental-health issues. That was how we left him in 2011’s Photographic Memory. After years of attempts at recovery, he died of a fentanyl overdose in 2016 at the age of 27. McElwee hasn’t made another picture since then. As he puts it at the very start of Remake, “I used to call myself a filmmaker.”
Although steeped in unfathomable grief, Remake is a fleet-footed work, traversing years and bouncing across McElwee’s cinematic timeline as he presents images of Adrian and addresses his deceased son throughout. As always, the director weaves together a variety of strands. The “remake” of the title ostensibly refers to Hollywood’s attempts to remake Sherman’s March, first as a movie, then as a streaming series. (It’s an absurd notion that gets even more so until it finally pays off in truly bizarre and beautiful fashion at the very end.) He also revisits friends and family and witnesses the ravages of time, particularly in the case of his once-vivacious and headstrong pal the poet and teacher Charleen Swansea (the subject of McElwee’s first feature and a scene-stealing presence in Sherman’s March), who now suffers from Alzheimer’s. Along the way, the director himself survives a brain tumor.
Through it all runs the story of Adrian, who grew up before McElwee’s camera and accompanied him on shoots and to meetings, to festivals and premieres, and had his own dreams of becoming a filmmaker. When McElwee shoots the contract signing for the remake of Sherman’s March, Adrian criticizes the boring angles Dad has chosen and records some of his own: A child of the music-video age, Adrian has a style quite different from his father’s, as are his ambitions. McElwee recoils at the idea of selling out or making commercials, while Adrian asks why he feels above that. Going over things Adrian shot over the years, the father searches not so much for clues about what happened but simply evidence of his son’s existence.
And maybe a communion. Having spent his career documenting his life, McElwee now tries to enter his son’s world through the young man’s footage. But he can’t, really. He watches skiing footage Adrian filmed, tries to catch a shadow of Adrian on the snow, then hears a sneeze and remembers his son’s sneezing as a young child. At one point in the skiing footage, Adrian stops and listens to the silence around him. McElwee fills it with his own voice. “I used to call myself a filmmaker,” he says, repeating the movie’s opening words. Then he adds, “I used to call myself your father.” It’s a lament and an incantation but perhaps also a way forward: The last section of Remake drops the constant intercutting and focuses on the final year of Adrian’s life. (The director has said in interviews that the title also refers to his attempts to remake his life.)
McElwee’s work has often been self-deprecating, though the playfulness is understandably muted this time around; what were once funny digs at his propensity to film everything now come with a good dose of guilt. Still, his introspective sensibility ensures that he’ll express and half-express a variety of ideas throughout, asking questions of himself, of Adrian, of the whole cinematic apparatus. He doesn’t find many answers, but that too speaks to the power of the work. Remake may be a film about death and loss and grief, but it’s not one of conclusions. In the end, McElwee does something perhaps unexpected but also heartbreaking and indescribably generous: He preserves the mystery of his son’s life.
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