Bits of other McElwee films, including Time Indefinite (1993) and Photographic Memory (2011), weave through Remake: This isn’t 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’d been married, divorced, and remarried, and who’d undergone surgery for a brain tumor. With Remake, we see him figuring out how Adrian’s 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’s 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’s version of self-parody, or was it a reflection of the kind of high-gloss life he’d wanted for himself? There’s no conclusive answer, and that’s something McElwee will have to live with.
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