Remake Review: Ross McElwee’s Introspective Documentary Haunts with Humanity 

“I used to call myself a filmmaker. I used to call myself your father.” 

These two sentences are repeated like a mantra through Ross McElwee’s latest searingly personal documentary, Remake, focused primarily on the devastating loss of his 27-year-old son Adrian to a fentanyl overdose in 2016. It’s the director’s first film in fifteen years—the last, Photographic Memory, also utilized his relationship with Adrian to tackle self-reflective themes around parenthood, perspective, and the passage of time. McElwee has, for decades, been a pioneer of the type of tangential documentary storytelling popularized of late by artists like Nathan Fielder and John Wilson; work that on the surface appears as though the person behind the lens is making it up on the fly and finding a destination in real time, yet is far more methodically researched and developed over painstaking hours in the editing room. (Unlike the majority of his earlier work, which he edited solely, McElwee pulled in the aid of master editor Joe Bini, whose oeuvre includes Grizzly Man and American Honey). 

“Painstaking” is an apt word in so many ways for Remake. Behind McElwee’s dryly soothing narration, there’s never any doubt that embarking on this endeavor to capture his son took a toll. Why endure an effort that one imagines being akin to repeatedly bludgeoning your heart? As the director puts it: “Looking at the footage to convince myself that you’re alive, but also to convince myself that you’re gone.” As the credits roll on Remake and viewers are left sitting with the myriad emotions it instills, McElwee’s final words, spoken in voiceover to a son who can’t hear them, linger with monumental impact: “I’ll never stop loving you.” Perhaps it could have been fine if no one had ever seen this picture—he wasn’t making it for us, as narration consistently speaking to Adrian makes clear. He made it for the son who is no longer around, to try reckoning with that grief, that guilt, that unending love. 

For more than 50 years, Ross McElwee has had a camera in his hands and captured boundless footage of the people in his life. We see in his most acclaimed work, 1985’s Sherman’s March (newly released in a gorgeous new restoration), how projects evolve from initial concept (there a documentary about the ripple effects of General Sherman’s famed march of destruction during the Civil War) into something far more personal and revealing about the filmmaker himself (it quickly detours into a repeated cycle of him following around women he becomes fascinated by until they eventually reject him). There’s a therapeutic quality to McElwee’s work, a packaging that defies simple definition. Even Remake is far more than a love letter to a son; cut amongst McElwee’s collage made from footage of his son’s life, we also see the director grappling with his own intense health condition, a marriage being forged and falling apart, and various professional victories and defeats. 

Remake gets its title from the foolhardy pitch he received for a Hollywood remake of Sherman’s March that would turn the documentary into a fiction feature directed by Steve Carr, whose credits include Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Doctor Dolittle 2, and Daddy Day Care. Not exactly the person you’d think would be a fan of Sherman’s March, to put it lightly, let alone with a passionate plea to turn it into mainstream entertainment. Adrian sees the vision, though, as we witness numerous discussions between the director and his son about the need to sell yourself out for commercial gain in order to make a profit to help fund the things you truly care about. 

As McElwee takes us on the journey of Adrian’s life, we periodically check in on progress (or lack thereof) of the Sherman’s March adaptation, which morphs from a feature film into an hour-long TV series into a (gulp) half-hour sitcom to, eventually, nothing at all. It’s a dry, charmingly absurd satire straight out of an Albert Brooks picture, except it’s real, and Remake never gets funnier than the scene in which we experience McElwee reacting, with puzzled exhaustion, to the marketing reel that’s been made to pitch Sherman’s March as a television show that suggests Modern Family more than the complex, profound work of his documentary. 

While these two stories might, on their face, not seem to connect, they both speak to the nature of art and perspective in storytelling. McElwee shows us Adrian as a young boy; bright, charismatic on camera, and so full of innocence and life. For many parents, this is the image they’ll always see of their children. But over the years, we witness the evolution of Adrian into someone with his own unique pain; he wears it on his face as he battles with his father over being filmed and his career path. Yet Adrian always remains that bright kid—we understand the enormity of ambition as he waxes poetic on entrepreneurial dreams to become a filmmaker himself, along with numerous other fields he looks to employ as a sort of multi-hyphenate jack of all trades. 

When looking back at Sherman’s March, McElwee allows us to check in with Charleen Swansea, a scene-stealing figure who explodes every time she’s in the frame with her vivacious personality and no-bullshit attitude (she was the primary subject of the director’s decade-earlier picture, Charleen or How Long Has This Been Going On?). Charleen is now suffering from Alzheimer’s and doesn’t remember the good ol’ days when McElwee tells her he’s been looking back at that footage and is letting her know how much everyone adores her. If anything, reminders of a time that she can no longer experience, not even in her memory, seems to irritate her. This is a recognition for McElwee: what we see onscreen is a story that he’s presenting to us, and that perspective is just his. 

It’s an idea reflected in his capturing of Adrian, particularly as Ross allows us to see some footage of a documentary Adrian himself was working on, focused on his group of friends and their experiences with opioids. Here we get an achingly honest look at this life from the inside, but one with an immense amount of self-awareness as well. In one of Remake‘s final scenes, Adrian is fresh out of one of many stints in rehab (it will be his last before passing) and the perspective he shares with his father is one of incredible wisdom—of recognition for what he’s gone through and where he’s faltered, but of optimism for the future. As is recognizable for many who have lost loved ones to addiction, it’s a stark acknowledgement of how quickly things can change, and that person can be gone forever. 

McElwee at one point recalls a comment a journalist made about his film Photographic Memory, that he was too harsh on his own son. This note is something that has haunted him. What he believed to be an honest look at a young man who was struggling, but eventually would be okay, was seen by someone else as a condemnation of the struggles he faced without that recognition of value and hope. He wonders if Adrian ingrained that same feeling in himself, that this was how his father saw him. He’ll never know what Adrian really felt about it. All he’s left with is decades of footage filtered through the perspective of his camera lens. In exquisite, excruciating detail, Remake captures all the beauty and the pain.

Remake opens in limited release on July 10.