Ross McElwee is the film-maker who spun home movies into art, framing himself and his friends and his son Adrian. The director used to film Adrian for a few minutes each month. He tracked the kid from infancy to adulthood, trying to catch the significant turns of his life.
When tragedy struck it back-shadowed the footage. Maybe every home movie is a ghost story at heart. It feels crass to compliment McElwee on his latest documentary, Remake, because it isn’t the picture he’d ever have chosen to make.
It is instead a grief-struck tour-de-force: a magnificent film about film-making and its real-world repercussions. McElwee filmed Adrian because he loved him, but now fears he might have hurt him. So he sifts through the material in search of clues, addressing his son as though he’s still in the room.
A Hollywood producer wanted to shoot a fictionalised version of his 1986 documentary Sherman’s March. McElwee decided to follow the process – to make a new documentary about adapting an old documentary. That might be funny, he thought.
Adrian’s mental health was deteriorating. He became addicted to opioids. He died from a fentanyl overdose at the age of 27, in the bathroom of McElwee’s Boston home.
And compared to everything I was facing, the film seemed banal and frivolous.” He took a year to regroup and plotted a new course. A more traditional film-maker would have junked the original idea. McElwee has audaciously chosen to preserve it, so that the remake plays as a kind of absurd counterbeat to the anguish of Adrian’s death.
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