I’ll be honest, when I first encountered Ross McElwee’s work
I was less than thrilled. It wasn’t his fault. Well, maybe that’s not entirely
true. It was his film, Sherman’s March, that I was responding to after all, but
my response had more to do with where I was as a viewer at that time, and as
John Landis said, “Everything about a movie is who you are and where you are
when you saw it.”
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When I first saw Sherman’s March I had just sabotaged a
twelve-year relationship and somehow fell into a rebound relationship with
someone who … well, let’s just say that it takes a certain kind of person to
get involved with someone who is just days out of a twelve-year relationship.
Watching Ross meander around the South and interviewing his ex-es seemed
self-indulgent, to put it kindly. It was, in fact, too close to home and I was
completely blind to the film’s bigger picture.
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You can read a mini-interview I conducted with Ross McElwee
on FilmmakerMagazine.com.
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But
Sherman’s March was powerful, in its subtle way,
so much so that I knew there was more to the film than I was letting in. Many years
passed before I decided to watch the film again. And then I loved it.
Sherman’s
March wasn’t a work of narcissism. The film did something only the best memoirs
do, and that is tell a personal story that resonates with many people. As I
watched more of McElwee’s films, I admired how seemingly effortlessly he
managed to show that his story was also somehow my story. This despite the two
of us having nothing in common: he was student at M.I.T. and studied with some
pretty amazing filmmakers, he is a successful documentary filmmaker, a
Southerner, a teacher at Harvard, a husband, a father of two. I am none of
those things.
In McElwee’s new film, Photographic Memory (opening in
select theaters Friday, October 12), we find Ross and his twenty-something son,
Adrian, at each other’s throats. Like many twenty-somethings throughout
recorded time, Adrian is pissing off his father by trying to figure out what to
do with his life. He’s all over the place, with many interests and many
friends. Like many twenty-somethings in this millennium, he is tethered to the
Internet. Ross tries to understand how Adrian went from the poetic little boy to
the surly boy-man by traveling back to St. Quay-Portrieux in Brittany, a place
instrumental in his own journey into adulthood. Like other journeys into the
past, he searches for the people, in this case a photographer who was a mentor and
a boss, and a mysterious woman he was involved with.
Again, I don’t have a defiant young son, my journey into
adulthood took place in suburban New Jersey, and there was no exotic French
woman.
But I was a young adult once, and like many young adults, I
had a difficult relationship with a parent. And if you were a young adult once,
I think you’ll find several moments in Photographic Memory that will rip your
heart out, in the best way. If you are a parent of a child of any age, I
imagine you’ll double relate.
What is universal here are two people united and separated
by blood. Ross and his son Adrian don’t want to hurt each other, but neither
can help behaving in ways that make the other crazy. If Adrian is the typical
twenty-something engaging in some risky behavior (freestyle skiing while
under the influence), Ross is the typical middle-aged father of such a child,
engaging in over-protective behavior that is sure to enrage his son (snooping
around in his room). Ross can’t help but look at the adult Adrian and see (and
show us) that little boy on the beach, and Adrian can’t help but assert his
independence. Add to this the generational divide, symbolized by Adrian’s
embrace of our hyperspeed technology and Ross’s wariness of it, and you
have a portrait of many father-son relationships throughout the world,
throughout history.
Anyone over 45 will recognize the impulse to visit an
important place in one’s development, and those who undertook the venture will
recognize the results. His trip back in time is disorienting, melancholy,
enlightening, nerve-wracking, and sometimes exciting. Ghosts inhabit rooms that
seem familiar and unfamiliar, long-lost loves are encountered and the meetings
are comfortable and awkward, secrets are revealed and memories sneak up and
explode. At the end of a long day he turns the camera on himself, stares into
the lens, and in his smooth voice over says, “Seriously, how did I get to be
this old?”
Sounds a little like your high school reunion, doesn’t it?
There
is no spoiler alert here, because to say that Photographic Memory concludes isn’t quite
accurate. McElwee’s documentaries fade out gently, invite conversation, and
linger in our consciousness, whether we’re ready to let them in fully or not.
If we are in that place where we are receptive to one of his films, we welcome
that chapter and all the disappointments and triumphs, the cruelty and
kindness, that he will share with us in his inimitably humorous and melancholy
way.
