“Remake” Confronts a Father’s Grief and a Filmmaker’s Responsibility

The ethical core of “Remake” is McElwee’s own cinematic practice, a subject that has come to the fore in previous films of his, when subjects—particularly family members—take issue with his recording private situations and making them public. In “Remake,” McElwee considers Adrian’s troubles in light of their relationship, both as father and son and as filmmaker and subject. He talks about the casual filmmaking he did with Adrian, done a bit at a time but adding up to a large amount of material. These are essentially home movies, but home movies with a difference, because, unlike those of most families, McElwee’s footage sometimes reaches the public eye (as in the childhood fishing scenes in “Photographic Memory”). The film “In Paraguay,” though filmed in 1995, didn’t première until 2008, at the Venice Film Festival, after which, McElwee says, further screenings were “postponed indefinitely” until he and Marilyn “could negotiate” the public display of family life. (The matter appears not to have been resolved: “In Paraguay” has never been released, and McElwee’s website lists it as “currently out of distribution.”) During the period covered in “Remake,” Marilyn seeks a divorce; the film leaves the impression (confirmed by McElwee in a recent interview) that his filming at home was one of the reasons she did so. The couple agrees to a separation, despite being worried, McElwee says, about its effect on their children. Soon, while McElwee is living alone in an apartment in Boston, Adrian, a college student, is taken to a hospital emergency room after overdosing, and then moves in with his father.

The nature of fatherhood is a recurrent preoccupation in McElwee’s work. In “Photographic Memory,” he contrasts the relationships he and his brother had with their father, a surgeon. McElwee’s brother, having followed their father into the medical profession, received mentorship and experienced the glow of paternal pride, whereas McElwee’s youthful filmmaking vocation was met with bewilderment and doubt. When McElwee finds that Adrian is interested in filmmaking, he hopes to be able to provide the guidance and encouragement that his brother got and he didn’t. But his view of Adrian’s methods, goals, and way of life end up making the bond of mentorship both tenuous and barbed. Adrian, a freestyle skiier, made videos of himself and friends doing difficult and dangerous stunts, and sometimes did so while himself skiing fast and, McElwee asserts, under the influence. Moreover, for all Adrian’s artistic efforts, he doesn’t manage to complete anything, and McElwee’s impatience is as apparent as his concern; he nonetheless tries to help.

When McElwee gets an offer from a movie producer for rights to make a fictional adaptation of “Sherman’s March,” he accepts—in part, in the hope that the Hollywood production will have a job for Adrian and help to launch him in a professional movie career. Yet, at the same time, McElwee is dubious of his son’s ambitions. He believes that a life in the camera eye and on the big and small screen has given Adrian a skewed view of the pleasure and power of fame, and their conversations only reinforce this view. Adrian complains that McElwee, instead of making documentaries, should have followed the lucrative path of a Hollywood director, and even reproaches him for having turned down an offer to make a TV commercial. He says that his father should have tried to make him a child star rather than making his childhood a subject of documentaries.

But Adrian also offers a more incisive criticism. He says that McElwee should be “reversing the roles, sometimes, a little more”—that is, that he should allow Adrian to film him as well as the other way around. Adrian also says bluntly that McElwee should come out more often from behind the camera, and McElwee responds, “People don’t want to see a film about me, they want to see a film about what I see.” Adrian disagrees, and he’s right: some of the best sequences in “Sherman’s March,” for instance, are ones in which McElwee sets a camera and mike on a tripod and, all by himself, films himself speaking directly into them. Such scenes are refreshing breaks from the filmmaker’s explorations of other people and of his connections with them; first, as a mere matter of style, their inherently static and durational format subjects him to a quasi-forensic interrogation of the sort that others, in the roving eye of a handheld camera, don’t receive. Second, most of McElwee’s commentary comes in the form of voice-over narration laid onto the soundtrack in the editing process, after the shooting is done; his onscreen presence, speaking of events as they’re unfolding, puts him at the same level of midstory uncertainty as his subjects, and deprives him of the commanding retrospective authority of the voice-over.