TELEVISION : ‘Time’: One Man’s Family Values

Beware of those moralizing, self-anointed guardians of virtue who toss “family values” at America like rice at newlyweds. What they usually have in mind for the rest of us are their family values.

Just how they’ll regard Ross McElwee’s quirky, probing, endearing “family” film, “Time Indefinite,” remains to be seen. It’s the Tuesday night season opener for “P.O.V.,” the nonfiction film series that conservatives often cite to bolster their fallacious argument that PBS is somewhat to the left of Fidel Castro. Expect that attack to resume June 14 when “P.O.V.” (which stands for Point of View) airs “One Nation Under God,” a film that justifiably smirks at the quackery employed by chaster-than-thou zealots seeking to exorcise the evil spirit of homosexuality from gays.

A program of a strikingly different persuasion is the two-hour “Time Indefinite,” in which McElwee--who boldly confesses to being heterosexual--continues the self-exploration on videotape that he began with “Sherman’s March” in 1986.

That earlier personal journal captured McElwee’s whimsically futile search for a steady gal. More poignant is “Time Indefinite,” which wryly, but also movingly, monitors his family’s cycles and passages, the sad along with the exhilarating. Although McElwee at times gets a little carried away with his Angst and Why-do-I-feel-the-way-I-do? self-absorption, you can’t pull yourself away from this peephole. It’s the kind of detailed film in which something as seemingly banal as a peek inside a sock drawer earns a certain significance.

It opens happily in 1987 with the 39-year-old Cambridge, Mass., bachelor taping a McElwee family reunion in North Carolina (“There is my sister-in-law, Sally”) at which Ross announces his coming marriage to Marilyn Levine, a fellow filmmaker. His surgeon father, stepmother and everyone else are thrilled. They’d given up hope.

McElwee immediately displays his self-effacing side and his eye for absurdity, inserting much-earlier footage of his sister, Deedee, rowing them in a small boat while soberly assessing his breakup with a previous girlfriend. “Do you think any of it had to do with your lifestyle, the way you dress, the way you live? I think you should tidy up a little bit.”

This man is a compulsive chronicler. So there, too, is his footage of an earlier blind date arranged for him by his close friend, Charlene Swansea, who playfully puts her hand over his lens to stop him from taping his date’s arrival. No chance. “That particular blind date didn’t work out,” he adds, drolly, in a monotone voice-over.

A sort of real-life Max Headroom, McElwee and his camera seem to merge into a single unit, his head becoming the lens. This obsession with stockpiling everything on camera at first strikes you as the aimless accumulation of a video pack rat. But soon it’s obvious that these tiny moments and bits of routine and trivia (somehow fascinating) are life layers underlying the epidermis. Together, they’re what living is about.

McElwee uses his camera to sweetly brush-stroke Marilyn, capturing everything about her that he adores, including even “the intense way” she brushes her teeth. There they are together getting a marriage license. “Don’t mind him,” Marilyn tells a clerk quizzically eyeing the camera. “He sort of does this all the time.”

Only occasionally does her impatience surface. “If you put the camera down,” Marilyn tells Ross while unpacking boxes in their new home, “you could help.” Ever relentless, though, he has his camera going when she’s on her back, legs apart, being examined by her gynecologist, who pronounces her “all set for baby city.”

And when she does get pregnant after they’re married, the camera is rolling when she informs her parents, and when the couple goes shopping for baby gear. “$70 for the quilt--really beautiful work,” the saleswoman says before leaving. Marilyn turns to the lens, whispering: “What do you think, Ross?”

What Ross thinks matters not only to his wife but also to Ross, whose introspection intensifies when his life is rocked by a cluster of tragedies that bring a somberness to “Time Indefinite.” The two major themes that thread the film--death and continuity--are touchingly juxtaposed, partially through scratchy old home movies of McElwee’s parents’ wedding and his grandmother singing vaudeville songs many years before her appearance in his present film as an incontinent old woman eroding in a home for the aged. And even as death shadows Ross’ life, the McElwee family’s longtime housekeeper celebrates her 50th wedding anniversary.

Despite his omnipresence behind the camera, the bearded, eggheadish-looking McElwee is the least-taped subject in his autobiographical film. And neither he nor Marilyn is as arresting as his friend, Charlene, an intriguing woman of almost mystical intelligence. Ross and his camera are along when she returns to the now-restored, lovely old house that her estranged husband, Buck, burned down as an act of protest, cremating himself in the process. A framed picture of the epic blaze hangs on a wall inside the local firehouse, and Charlene notes the irony. “It was the pinnacle of their life,” she says, “his death.”

* “P.O.V.” airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15.