{"id":4211,"date":"2026-07-12T09:12:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T04:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/?p=4211"},"modified":"2026-07-12T09:12:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T04:12:00","slug":"with-remake-a-documentarian-maps-the-shape-of-his-grief-and-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/?p=4211","title":{"rendered":"With Remake, a Documentarian Maps the Shape of His Grief, and Career"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><script>\r\n  atOptions = {\r\n    'key' : '644b717812d811d6a1c1fc5b6ccd6fa6',\r\n    'format' : 'iframe',\r\n    'height' : 90,\r\n    'width' : 728,\r\n    'params' : {}\r\n  };\r\n<\/script>\r\n<script src=\"https:\/\/www.highperformanceformat.com\/644b717812d811d6a1c1fc5b6ccd6fa6\/invoke.js\"><\/script>\r\n<br \/>\n<\/p>\n<section>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.time.com\/v3\/assets\/bltea6093859af6183b\/bltf524f970b45dcf6f\/6a511387b7437ee7f81f7a5a\/REMAKE_img1_300dpi.jpg?branch=production\" \/><figcaption>Ross McElwee&#8217;s son Adrian, who died in 2016 at 27, in footage in Remake \u2014Courtesy of Music Box Films<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/section>\n<section>\n<p>Parents often say that what they fear most is losing a child; those who end up suffering that loss often say there\u2019s nothing more painful. When you\u2019re documentary filmmaker\u2014a person who, by temperament and training, processes what they see and feel through a camera lens\u2014how do you face that kind of grief <em>without<\/em> trying to reassemble events and feelings into a whole that makes some kind of sense?<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s exactly the tangled trail Ross McElwee navigates with <em>Remake,<\/em> which is both a reflection on his career as a documentary filmmaker and, more significantly, an act of mourning for his son, Adrian, who died in 2016 at age 27 after years of struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. Adrian himself was an aspiring filmmaker; he left behind hours and hours\u2019 worth of footage that his father couldn\u2019t bring himself to look at for several years. It also took McElwee some time to reckon with the images he\u2019d recorded of his son since childhood; he\u2019d filmed a few minutes every month, randomly, obviously not knowing how potent these small, intimate moving pictures would eventually become. <em>Remake<\/em> opens with some of this footage: we see an obviously bright, enthusiastic kid of eight or so catching crawdads in a netted trap he\u2019d designed himself. Adrian loved all kinds of fishing, and when his father asks him, off-camera, why he likes it so much, his response shimmers with minnowlike poetry: \u201cThe deep surprise of the ocean\u2014you never know what you\u2019ll catch.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>How, you wonder, does such a beautiful, smart, open-hearted kid end up so troubled he can\u2019t stay away from drugs? But that\u2019s always the question\u2014because every human being starts out as a child, a sketched promise. With <em>Remake,<\/em> McElwee interlaces that promise, as best he can, with the charming but anxiety-ridden adult his son grew up to be. The movie is at times painful to watch. But it\u2019s also funny, reflective, endearing in an off-kilter way\u2014a little like the film that brought McElwee to prominence in 1985, <em>Sherman\u2019s March,<\/em> in which McElwee, at the time a young man, sought to make a documentary about Gen. William Sherman\u2019s sojourn through the South and ended up with a more personalized account of his own romantic travails, all in the context of modern life\u2014including the threat of nuclear war.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.time.com\/v3\/assets\/bltea6093859af6183b\/blt037963c58322d2e0\/6a5113ca1dd91a40de6b2974\/REMAKE_img2_300dpi.jpg?branch=production\" \/><figcaption>McElwee at work \u2014Courtesy of Music Box Films<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/section>\n<section>\n<p><em>Sherman\u2019s March<\/em>\u2014itself being re-released, by Music Box Films, in a 4K restoration\u2014plays a big part in <em>Remake,<\/em> too. This isn\u2019t just an elegy for a lost boy, but also a way for McElwee to put his own career into the larger context of his life. Years after the release of <em>Sherman\u2019s March,<\/em> McElwee was approached by filmmaker Steve Carr (director of comedies like <em>Daddy Day Care<\/em> and <em>Paul Blart: Mall Cop<\/em>), who loved the movie and wanted to remake it as a fiction feature. McElwee was skeptical, but eventually agreed, with the stipulation that he be allowed to make a documentary about the remaking of his own film.<\/p>\n<p>The project shifted shape over the years: at one point, it was set to become a TV mini-series, then a half-hour sit-com. Eventually, the enterprise fell through altogether, pretty much to McElwee\u2019s relief. But at the time McElwee was considering the idea of the <em>Sherman\u2019s March<\/em> remake, Adrian was a young man, hoping to make his own way as a media entrepreneur (including plans for a clothing line\u2014if his ambitions were a bit scattershot, they were at least imaginative). <em>Remake<\/em> includes footage of Adrian urging his father to consider Carr\u2019s offer, and gently scolding him for having passed up certain opportunities to make money\u2014money that would have made the family&#8217;s life better\u2014off his filmmaking acumen. He points out that his dad once refused an offer to make a Jaguar commercial, and though McElwee is off-camera, you pretty much feel him weighing the wisdom of this criticism. Would making that commercial <em>really<\/em> have been selling out? The moment is complex, amusing, piercing. Adrian, at this point, is a bit of a bratty know-it-all, but he isn\u2019t totally wrong, and McElwee knows it.<\/p>\n<p>Bits of other McElwee films, including <em>Time Indefinite<\/em> (1993) and <em>Photographic Memory<\/em> (2011), weave through <em>Remake:<\/em> This isn\u2019t solely a movie about grief, but about the ways grief must fit into our lives. We learn a lot about McElwee not just as a dad, but as a person, a man who\u2019d been married, divorced, and remarried, and who\u2019d undergone surgery for a brain tumor. With <em>Remake,<\/em> we see him figuring out how Adrian\u2019s story, in all its sadness, has melded with his. He uses footage shot by Adrian to reckon with the mysteries his son left behind: there\u2019s a mini-movie the younger McElwee had made about attending the Venice Film Festival in 2011 with his father, a tiny music-video opus in which Adrian shows himself lining up shots at the bar and partying it up with babes. In voiceover, McElwee thinks aloud about what he, and we, are watching: was it Adrian&#8217;s version of self-parody, or was it a reflection of the kind of high-gloss life he&#8217;d wanted for himself? There\u2019s no conclusive answer, and that\u2019s something McElwee will have to live with.<\/p>\n<p>Most affecting is McElwee\u2019s inclusion of some skiing footage Adrian shot after he moved from Boston to Colorado in the later years of his life. As we watch some unnamed skier glide down pillowy-soft mounds of snow, McElwee whispers on the soundtrack, \u201cI used to call myself a filmmaker. I used to call myself your father.\u201d No parent who ever loses a child to drug addiction ever says, \u201cI intervened too much.\u201d It\u2019s always, \u201cDid I do enough to help?\u201d and that\u2019s the question McElwee asks over and over again here, often without words. You can always remake a movie, but there\u2019s no way to remake a life. The best you can do is assemble and reassemble images and words until they form the fleeting shape of the person you knew. That&#8217;s what a memory is, a film we make and replay in our heads, and in our documentarian hearts.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<script async=\"async\" data-cfasync=\"false\" src=\"https:\/\/pl30214220.effectivecpmnetwork.com\/9ab3d4df8a7e1a6171e16ddbf732cc19\/invoke.js\"><\/script>\r\n<div id=\"container-9ab3d4df8a7e1a6171e16ddbf732cc19\"><\/div>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ross McElwee&#8217;s son Adrian, who died in 2016 at 27, in footage in Remake \u2014Courtesy of Music Box Films Parents often say that what they fear most is losing a child; those who end up suffering that loss often say there\u2019s nothing more painful. When you\u2019re documentary filmmaker\u2014a person who, by temperament and training, processes&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4212,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static.time.com\/v3\/assets\/bltea6093859af6183b\/bltf524f970b45dcf6f\/6a511387b7437ee7f81f7a5a\/REMAKE_img1_300dpi.jpg?branch=production","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pics-news"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}