1986 / Dir. Ross McElwee
Rating: 4.5/5
Watch if you like: Ken Burns and Nathan Fielder teaming up to remake High Fidelity; when your mom tries to set you up with a nice person from church, and it turns out they’re part of a fundamentalist apocalypse cult.
40 years ago, documentarian Ross McElwee, who honed his chops shooting for D. A. Pennebaker, receives a $9,000 grant to make a film tracing Civil War General William Sherman’s path of destruction that led to the end of the war while leaving deep scars upon the South that McElwee hoped to unearth. But after a relationship ends, he can’t fully move forward with the project, so he embarks on a personal journey to find love, explore his past relationships, and document everything in between.
Nowadays, we’re so used to watching people on YouTube weave their personal lives with cultural commentary, or even those unnecessarily long recipe blogs that give you way too much information about the author’s family life. When Sherman’s March came out in 1986, though, there was nothing like it; Michael Moore, who also helped popularize this type of personal documentary, wouldn’t release Roger & Me for three more years. Rereleased in a 4K restoration by Music Box Films to accompany McElwee’s latest film, Remake, Sherman’s March feels just as vital not only for the complexity and innovation of its form, but also for what it uncovers.
McElwee starts his journey by visiting his family, who are disappointed in his romantic failures and have invited all their friends’ single daughters to accompany them to the Scottish games. Soon after, he goes out in a canoe with his sister, who dresses him down, critiques his appearance, and tells him he needs to do better to meet women, suggesting his camera might be a conversation piece to help meet women. This won’t be the only time a friend or relative will hilariously dig into him.
After he runs into a recently divorced childhood crush and interviews her, his stepmother sets him up with a wannabe actress, Pat, who hopes to go to Hollywood and meet Burt Reynolds. She wants him to film her “cellulite exercises,” and he’ll lie awake at night thinking about how she told him she wasn’t wearing any underwear while fretting about nuclear war and humanity’s potential for imminent disaster. When Pat leaves, his brother gifts him a hunk-of-junk roadster that constantly breaks down, helping him embark on his journey and follow in Sherman’s footsteps.
Soon, a pattern emerges: along the way, Ross either meets a new woman or a woman from his past and tries to find love, inevitably landing himself in some deeply strange situations. This includes living on an island with a nudist linguist, musical Mormon doomsday preppers, an anti-government religious commune in the mountains, and multiple attempts to meet Burt Reynolds. When one situation doesn’t work out, his journey continues.
On just a surface level, Sherman’s March is incredibly funny and entertaining thanks to Ross embodying this proto-Nathan Fielder or Louis Theroux-esque character interacting with all these odd people. But what’s even more incredible is how he threads so many different pieces into a spectacularly deep, cohesive whole. McElwee uses Sherman as a metaphor for himself: both men leave either a string of deaths or failed relationships in their wake, and they’re also intertwined. Southern women were the ones left to pick up the pieces and carry the South culturally forward, to the point where Ross makes his McElwee’s March. And not necessarily for the better—McElwee doesn’t shy away from depicting the racist viewpoints of some of the participants.
The similarities also extend to capturing not just a time capsule of the South in the ‘80s, but of a culture now also trying to live in a time of potentially imminent nuclear obliteration, never having totally dealt with the destruction of the Civil War. It’s easy, too, to see the cultural threads of Sherman’s March in the state of our society today, whether that’s Christian Nationalists in power or trying to live through a time of pandemics, war, inequality, and ecological collapse.
Late in the film, Ross’s boisterous friend and former poetry teacher, Charlene, says to him, as she tries to set him up with yet another woman, “Turn it off! This isn’t art, this is life!” imploring him to put down the camera. He doesn’t and keeps on filming. With so many ideas finely woven together, its subtle observations on humanity, weird and wild characters, and groundbreaking documentary style make Sherman’s March feel as vital as ever in an age when people film every part of their lives.
Leave a Reply