Remake ★★★
- 2filmcritics
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Availability: See end of review.
“It’s not art, it’s life.”
“Stop filming—it’s not art, it’s life.” That line is spoken by Charleen Swansea, in “Sherman’s March,” Ross McElwee’s 1985 award-winning documentary, which began as a study of Gen. William T. Sherman’s “scorched earth” Civil War campaign through Georgia and ended up as something vastly more personal and idiosyncratic. The excerpt from “Sherman’s March” appears in this film, too—McElwee is known for using clips of previous films in subsequent work—and so does an aging Charleen, who decades later still rebels against McElwee’s method, calling the handheld camera, as it films and assaults her, a hateful and ugly object. Perhaps ironically, given “Remake’s” emphasis on connecting the past to the present, Charleen can’t recall participating in any of McElwee’s films.
Father and son—Ross and Adrian McElwee—in younger, happier days.
Charleen’s words take on a special urgency because “Remake” is a film about McElwee’s son, Adrian, who died at age 27 from a drug overdose in his father’s home on Christmas Eve, 2016. Early scenes feature Adrian as a happy, talkative, charming boy of roughly 8, who enjoys fishing and trolling for sea life, making primitive crafts, playing in the yard with his younger sister, telling stories and, in scenes taken from the older McElwee’s film “In Paraguay” (2008), engaging in imaginative play in a public park in that country’s capital, Asunción.
Unable to connect with a more predictable trajectory of his future, Adrian is drawn to memes of success.
We rejoin Adrian (his adolescence is curiously missing) as a young adult foundering, Gen Z-like, as if he were unsure how to navigate the world he’s been handed, all that joy seeped out of him. Unable to connect with a more predictable trajectory of his future, Adrian is drawn to memes of success: running a T-shirt business, making his own movies (like his Dad, he often films his milieu with a hand-held camera), and the celebrity life he observes as he accompanies his father to film festivals. Increasingly unhappy, anxious, and depressed, he gets into drugs. It’s all on film: Adrian’s own incomprehensible recording of what might be an evening with peers; a remark from the dais of the Venice Film Festival when he stumbles over an answer about his feelings of being the object of his father’s films (“I’m tired”); his half-naked body amid tousled sheets, after a night of excess.
Not everyone loved having a camera in their face.
“Remake” invites the idea, and the director-father courageously entertains it, that his lifelong filming of Adrian somehow contributed to his son’s death. As Charleen’s remarks suggest, not everyone loved having a camera in their face. McElwee’s first wife tolerated being filmed for a while, then refused, then they separated, then they divorced. His second wife would not allow her face to be filmed. His teenage daughter (her adoption in Paraguay led to that earlier film), captured in her father’s lens while eating her morning bowl of cereal, pointedly leaves the kitchen.
Like the recent “Blue Heron” and “The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel,” “Remake” raises issues related to the ethics of documentary filmmaking.
Adrian’s efforts to participate in the filming process—to make it his own, even if in a limited way—become moments of frustration and irritation for both father and son. Adrian is managing the camera while his father signs a contract giving rights to his first, Sundance-darling film to Hollywood producers. “Take the camera off the tripod and get a better shot,” his father instructs. “I don’t want to take it off the tripod.” “Move the tripod.” Although the older McElwee claims, at Venice, that his son could decide if he didn’t want to appear in certain frames in their then most recent film, it seems unlikely that Adrian, who posthumously has no voice, would have appreciated the shots of his body in bed in a drug-induced crash—yet there they are, and more than once. (Like the recent “Blue Heron” and “The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel,” “Remake” raises issues related to the ethics of documentary filmmaking.)
The older Adrian, joy seeped out of him, contemplating his drug addiction, and being filmed while contemplating.
The film’s final sequence—a clear break precedes the final 30 minutes—is an interrogation of the causes of Adrian’s death. It’s not about the father’s filming of his son or (much) about the father/son relationship, but rather foregrounds the drug trade, in a litany that includes the increasing availability of oxycodone and, later, fentanyl (the drug that killed his son), shown in a newspaper article; Chinese drug exports; Mexican cartels; pushers—and, finally, his own “if only” guilt, mentioned briefly, at not looking into his son’s bedroom the night he died. McElwee also laments his failure to fully understand his son’s mental illness (in addition to depression, Adrian was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder), but that “excuse” or reason is only lightly touched on here.
Charleen Swansea, from 1985 "Sherman's March," telling Ross McElwee to stop filming: "It's not art. It's life."
What does “Remake” tell us about this father, this man? He can be sensitive, wondering if the film festival circuit has given his son a false sense of what he could, or should, become. More deeply, he wonders if, in filming his son, and in assembling that footage in this film, he has made it possible to more fully remember his dead son, or only to remember the on-screen version, in effect “erasing” the real son.
He is in control. The gaze is only his. Maybe it’s all about him.
McElwee can also be cold, cerebral, detached. Charleen, even in 1985, tries to rev him up to feel “passion.” Here (and in all the clips he assembles), he’s unemotional throughout. He doesn’t cry. Although he sometimes appears in his own films and provides occasional voice-over narrations (McElwee has been labeled the pioneer of the first-person narrative documentary), he is always the subject, never the object. It seems obvious that his obsessive filming is a form of distancing, from his son as well as from others. Although the director’s willingness to show moments of resistance to his methods (Charleen’s comment opening this review) suggests honesty and authenticity, he can come across as willful and arrogant. In one memorable scene, he explains to his son, who turns the camera on his father, that “they,” his audience, “want to see what I see.” He is in control. The gaze is only his. Maybe it’s all about him.
McElwee’s narcissism (the word is fitting, if a trifle strong) comes across in the film’s subplot or ostensible plot, represented in the title: “Remake.” The running theme has McElwee weighing a variety of Hollywood projects designed to “remake” “Sherman’s March”: first as a feature film, then, as a documentary about the making of a fictional version of that first documentary (this layering of versions produced laughs in the audience at our screening), and when classic Hollywood falls through, as a TV series, then a TV special, then a half-hour TV comedy—until it finally comes together as projected scenes from “Sherman’s March” accompanied by live opera performances (not bad!).
That McElwee could meld a story about his earlier film and his career into the tragedy of his son Adrian’s life and death, reveals the enigma that is Ross McElwee, and the enigma—at once messy, compelling, perverse, and sad—that is “Remake.” Uncomfortable to watch. Unfailingly interesting.
He says: It was shocking to read New York Times critic Alissa Wilkinson describe Ross McElwee as “one of the most influential filmmakers of the past 50 years,” given I had never heard of him. That’s a discussion to be had.
She says: I thought Wilkinson was entertaining her own peculiar taste, and then I saw the number of 100 ratings from other top critics, and the documentarians who said they’ve been influenced by McElwee (Michael Moore, Ira Glass among them). Yet I come back to how unethical and distasteful what McElwee is doing here was for me. I think, without any possibility of his son’s consent or participation, he was trying to “remake” his father/son relationship. I can’t enable that.
Date: 2025 festival release; 2026 theater release
Director: Ross McElwee
Starring: Ross McElwee, Adrian McElwee, Charleen Swansea, as themselves
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 114 minutes
Other Awards: 3 wins, including the 2025 Venice Film Festival Impact Golden Globes Prize for Documentary, beating out Laura Poitras and others, and 1 other nomination to date
Availability: Showing in limited release in the United States. Wider, staged release begins July 31. Often showing with a new 4K version of the 1985 “Sherman’s March.” No estimate of online availability. Given the past history of distributor Music Box Films, mid-September to October seems a likely estimate for rental or purchase at home. See JustWatch here for current availability.