McElwee's Sherman

Remember those home movies your crazy uncle would show at big family events? Everyone would gather round the screen to laugh at Aunt Bertha's swollen thighs, smirk at cousin Damien's antics, and smile at Grandma Smith's sweet girlishness as she shied from the camera's probing lens. Everyone was thrilled and secretly proud and yet vaguely terrified to see themselves caught and fixed on screen.

Ross McElwee's amazing new film Sherman's March shares the best elements of home movies. The film's ostensible subject is the director Ross McElwee himself, and the photography and synchronized sound were taken by McElwee as he lugged his 16mm camera to secluded islands, mountain retreats and the guest bedrooms of a series of women from his romantic past. But unlike your basic home movie, McElwee has not sent forth a slew of random holiday footage. On the contrary, he has edited meticulously some 30 hours of hand-held adventure filming to produce a rueful, bittersweet gem.

In 1981, McElwee headed South to retrace the path taken by General William Tecumseh Sherman on his devastating Civil War march. McElwee was born and raised in Charlotte, N.C., so the trip was to be a kind of homecoming. He had been obsessed with Sherman's legacy since coming North to school and was all set to film a serious documentary about the man whose infamy lives below the Mason-Dixon line. Taking a quick detour in New York to bivouac with his girlfriend, McElwee was on his way.

But things went poorly in New York. His girlfriend broke off their relationship to return to an old boyfriend, and McElwee changed the film's focus to explore his self-professed problems with women, perfunctorily set in the larger context of a Southern historical odyssey. Thus the film's full title: Sherman's March: A meditation on the possibility of romantic love in the South during an era of nuclear weapons proliferation.

Like the long subtitle of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove ("How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb"), McElwee intends his heading to be freighted with the self-reflective and humorous tone that spirits both films. Had his foibles and follies been related without a strong dose of comic relief, the film could have degenerated into confessional and self-indulgent mush.

Instead, a gallery of unforgettable characters keeps popping up to take our minds off of "Poor Ross," and McElwee's periodic monologues, generally spoken to the camera as he lies scratching himself in his pajamas, are tour-de-force, unrehearsed stand-up routines. If Ebert/Siskel ever decide to review this film, which they won't because no one gets exploited, I vote they show the four-minute passage where McElwee discusses Sherman with his pal the camera while dressed in a Confederate uniform and swilling good Southern Scotch.

The most memorable of McElwee's woman friends is Charleen, who was the subject of an acclaimed short film the filmmaker completed several years ago. Charleen is a middle-aged woman who takes to the director like a surrogate mother, berating his inability to land a wife and accusing him of cowardly hiding behind his camera. She's a breath of sanity in McElwee's tornado of batty aspiring actresses and born-again survivalists.

But by the end, we come to sympathize with McElwee's solitary allegiance to his camera--it's the only constant the ironic and self-effacing artist has.

Sherman's March raises provocative questions about the relationship between art and life, about the consuming passion of art in the face or ordinary life, and about the love of one artist for the medium that gives him pleasure and sometimes threatens his life. To these young eyes, all that spells one masterpiece of a home movie. Look for it to screen at the Orson Welles or Carpenter Center theaters in the spring.