MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Time’ a Meditation on Mortality

Ross McElwee is a documentarian of a very special sort. Although he’s made movies about subjects like Cape Canaveral and the Berlin Wall, his flair is for the kind of self-examining “personal” film that, to the untutored eye, resembles a home movie. “Sherman’s March,” his surprise art-house success seven years ago, was made on the heels of a breakup with his girlfriend as he followed the route of Sherman’s march on Atlanta. The film was engagingly desultory and sweet-spirited and became a cult hit.

The cult hasn’t really gone to his head. “Time Indefinite” (at the Laemmle’s Sunset-5 for an indefinite weekend run) doesn’t try to canonize McElwee’s latest exploits. It simply follows his life in the recent past as he attends a family reunion in Charlotte, N.C., is married, and endures a series of unforeseen sorrows.

What starts out as a jaunty, dawdling jape becomes a kind of meditation on mortality. But McElwee doesn’t make you wince at his seriousness. His bafflement at what is going on in his life is a genuine, unadorned response to tragedy; you don’t feel as if he’s exploiting his ill fortune. (For a self-documentarian like McElwee, that would have seemed really smarmy.) And there’s an element of mystery in what he does. He keeps the camera going in his movies during all manner of events--from his meeting a blind date to accompanying his wife to the gynecologist.

He’s aware, as his friend Charleen tells him, that he’s using the camera as a way to deny reality, and yet for McElwee movie-making is also a way of heightening experience. (That’s what makes him a true filmmaker.) He is rarely observed by us in this film--he exists primarily in voice-over narration--and yet he’s the consciousness of everything that we see. “Time Indefinite” is a one-of-a-kind movie because McElwee himself seems one-of-a-kind.

‘Time Indefinite’

A First Run Features release. Directed, produced, filmed, sound recorded and edited by Ross McElwee. Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes.

Times rated: Mature. Times guidelines: includes female nudity and a gynecological exam.