By Sam Adams

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July 11, 202610:00 AM

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What if the only movie you could make was a movie no one would ever want to make?

Over the past 15 years, I’ve occasionally wondered: What ever happened to Ross McElwee? With 1987’s Sherman’s March, a supposedly historical documentary that ends up being about McElwee’s quest to fulfill his parents’ wishes and find a nice Southern girl to settle down with, he established himself as one of the brightest stars in the documentary firmament, sweetening the autobiographical essay film with a heady infusion of North Carolina charm. After that, he was back every few or so years with a new movie, each ostensibly taking on a different subject but inevitably, in what became the running joke of his career, about himself. (Fans of John Wilson will recognize the pattern, as well as the forerunner to Wilson’s halting, conversational narration.) Movies like 1993’s Time Indefinite, which opens with McElwee’s engagement to fellow filmmaker Marilyn Levine, and 2003’s Bright Leaves, which chases down the rumor that a 1950 Gary Cooper movie may have been inspired by McElwee’s family’s history, each have their own shape, their own concerns. But watching them over the years was like periodically checking in on an old friend, watching him marry, have children, reckon with the death of his father and the joys of parenthood, and try to find meaning in a world that kept wriggling away from his attempts to make sense of it.

Then: nothing.

After Photographic Memory was released in 2011, McElwee went dark. Years rolled by with no new film, and the ones that had made his reputation drifted out of circulation, enough for a generation of cinephiles to all but forget he’d ever existed. When he resurfaced last fall with Remake, the return of one of the great American documentary filmmakers—which is to say one of the great American filmmakers, period—should have been hailed as a major event. But after the film’s premiere in Venice, it was passed over by the major North American festivals—Toronto, Telluride, New York—that might have been expected to embrace it. (It finally made landfall at the True/False Film Fest in March.)

There’s no obvious explanation for why so many seasoned curators turned up their noses at what is arguably McElwee’s strongest movie since Sherman’s March, which is being released in a restored version alongside Remake, especially when reviews have been nothing but raves. (It’s not necessary to see any, let alone all, of McElwee’s past films before Remake, but while it functions as a stand-alone masterpiece, it’s a much richer experience if you know how hard-won the truths it arrives at have been.) The gap between films, however, is explained by Remake itself. As McElwee tells the viewer early on, the years after Photographic Memory were marked by the death of his 27-year-old son Adrian, of an accidental fentanyl overdose. Adrian was a regular presence in McElwee’s movies as far back as Time Indefinite, which includes the sounds of Levine giving birth to him. But Photographic Memory found the sweet-hearted boy grown into an anguished, directionless young adult, drifting off course as McElwee tried, sometimes clumsily, to set him right. It’s hard to imagine a subject a parent would less want to sit with for the time it takes to complete a film than the death of a child. And yet the process established by 40-plus years of making movies with himself as their primary subject meant there was no other movie McElwee could make. So, for years, he just stopped. The first words he speaks in Remake are, “I used to be a filmmaker.”

As McElwee told Slate’s Dan Kois in an interview last week, it was a long time after Adrian’s death before he could even look at the footage he’d shot of his son. But there’s also the fact that, for all the existential angst threaded through his entire body of work, McElwee fundamentally recoils at the idea of treating his own woes too seriously. Sherman’s March not only draws a tongue-in-cheek equivalency between his dating life and the Civil War, but bears the self-mocking subtitle A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation. Remake is terribly sad and eventually devastating, but it’s also laced with moments of joy and laughter, some involving an obviously doomed attempt to adapt Sherman’s March as a network sitcom.

Although McElwee constantly laments his inability to get outside of his own head, his movies embody a boundless interest in other people. Charleen Swansea, who first stepped in front of McElwee’s camera in 1977, has become one of the great recurring characters in the history of nonfiction cinema, a brassy Southern poet who palled around with Albert Einstein and studied with Ezra Pound. In Sherman’s March, she yells at McElwee to stop filming the woman he’s about to go on a date with and actually engage with her face-to-face: “This is not art,” she cries, “this is life!” The subject of one of McElwee’s earliest short documentaries, Swansea turns up in nearly every one of his movies, suffering divorce and the death of her ex-husband, the loss of her home and, by the time of Remake, her memory. It can be exasperating at times to feel like McElwee keeps discovering interesting characters and then turning the camera back on himself, but his gentle curiosity about the world and the people in it is what binds the movies together. He presents himself as a guy who can’t put his camera down, compelled to capture moments at the expense of being able to experience them firsthand. But his movies constantly dwell on the things he missed the first time, as if the films are somehow more perceptive than the man who made them.

McElwee’s onscreen persona is a scrappy underdog, awkwardly fumbling his way through his personal and professional lives. That tends to involve fuzzing a few details, like referring to being a Harvard professor as his “teaching job in Boston.” But Remake reckons with the shadow he casts over his son, a would-be mogul who can’t seem to decide which field he wants to make his mark in. He wants to shoot videos of himself and his friends doing tricks on the ski slopes or make a feature film with himself as the star, but he struggles with what is eventually diagnosed as bipolar disorder, as well as substance abuse issues and a string of apparently toxic personal and romantic relationships. McElwee tries to give Adrian a spotlight of his own, bringing him to Venice for the premiere of Photographic Memory and even including him in the film’s press conference. But in hindsight, he seems unable to shake the thought that it was precisely the wrong move, giving his son a taste of something he’d never be able to call his own. Remake includes some of the footage Adrian shot, and even credits him as one of its cinematographers, but there’s a crushing irony to watching him try to follow in his father’s footsteps.

Remake never makes this explicit, but in light of the circumstances of Adrian’s death, McElwee at least holds out the possibility that his lifelong compulsion to view the world through his camera may be something closer to an addiction. It’s certainly cost him in his personal life. McElwee’s family’s dislike of being filmed is a constant early on—his father, a successful surgeon who frowns on his son’s bohemian pretensions, bristles at the presence of “that big eye” in their kitchen—and he hints strongly that a dislike of being filmed is part of what ended his marriage to Levine. (In Paraguay, the movie made about the couple adopting their second child—a daughter, also largely absent from McElwee’s oeuvre—is briefly excerpted in Remake, but it was never released, and is only viewable by appointment.) Remake is a powerful capstone to McElwee’s filmmaking career, but it’s less of a triumphant summary than a painful act of self-questioning, looking back over decades of work and wondering: Is that it?

There’s a moment in Time Indefinite when he retrieves a roll of film from his parents’ attic, footage of their wedding shot by his uncle, a home-movie buff, that may have lain unseen until everyone in it was dead. Their images live on, of course—more so because McElwee made them mean something to people who’ve only met his parents through his films. But the people are gone, and it’s hard to say for sure whether immortalizing them in movies was worth the risk of estranging them in life. The impulse to film is ubiquitous now, but it captured Ross McElwee decades before everyone was shooting everything with their phones, which also means he’s lived with its consequences longer than almost anyone else. Remake feels like a cautionary tale from an early adopter, a warning from a future we can still steer clear of. Second time’s the charm.