I liked Sherman’s March (1986) the most when Charleen Swansea was in it. Swansea was once the high-school poetry teacher of the documentary’s director, Ross McElwee. Their instructor-student dynamic has, in the years since, shifted into more conventional friendship, though the older, wiser Swansea can’t resist extending time-tested advice to her former pupil when she thinks he needs it. The nearly three-hour Sherman’s March is notionally about McElwee’s quest to make a movie about the titular Civil War campaign and its ramifications. But more time is spent gleaning McElwee’s romantic disappointments than it is on U.S. history. The movie’s start dovetails with him getting dumped by his girlfriend, who wants to rekindle things with her ex. As McElwee spends the rest of the movie drifting through Georgia and South Carolina, visiting sites crucial to both the film’s stated purpose and his own upbringing — an older relative even keeps in the attic a sword-slashed couch left over from the Civil War — he, over and over again, gets involved with women who don’t find him worth revising their lives for.

First appearing close to Sherman’s March’s end, Swansea can’t stand how “self-effacing” and “polite” McElwee is. His recent succession of romantic rejections has left him feeling discouraged; Swansea balks at his pity party. He cannot expect, she reasons, to be enthusiastically embraced by potential romantic partners when he’s so allergic to outwardly showing passion. He cannot expect to forge long-lasting connections when he’s always toting around a camera, which doubles as a kind of self-erasing shield even as it flaunts physical proximity. “This is not art,” Swansea huffs when she notices McElwee, from whose visual vintage the film unfurls, still recording as she’s introducing him to a blind date. “This is life!”

Enthusiastically abiding by the philosophy that you’ll never get what you want if you don’t confidently seize on what you desire, the assertive Swansea is like a shot in the arm to Sherman’s March, which can be absurdly funny but is, more often, exhausting. It summons worthwhile ideas: that the documentary medium can as much illuminate its subject as reveal the limitations of its maker; that the camera can clarify and distort truths, sometimes in the same shot; that in his distraction-heavy journey interrogating the legacy of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, McElwee forges something of a parallel odyssey, only the destruction wreaked skews, naturally, far more internal. 

But McElwee’s initially compelling brand of self-flagellating solipsism — an obvious influence on contemporary, hard-to-categorize filmmakers like Nathan Fielder and especially John Wilson — grates when stretched to epic length. The sardonic observational humor punctuating the film’s first few “vignettes” — themselves about McElwee’s short-lived relationships with wannabe actress Pat; interior designer and single mother Claudia, who’s getting pulled into a cult-like Nuclear War-fearing survivalist group; and linguist Wini, who strings him along for the colleague with whom she lives in an estuary seething with humidity and bugs — loses its aslant charm.

The tedium that eventually overtakes erstwhile Sundance favorite Sherman’s March is arguably part of the point. If this is meant to be a self-portrait, then evoking the depressed listlessness McElwee feels is a mark of success. But the overall effect of a movie as built on repetition wouldn’t be diminished much, I don’t think, with some more self-editing, tightening. The film’s incisiveness as a work of introspection — one that, McElwee has noted, sometimes slips in outright fiction and reality-fudging exaggerations — grows smoother, more shapeless. Though the movie’s brigade of fans might, I doubt McElwee would take much offense to me saying I couldn’t wait for it to be over. He also clearly wanted the lonely pattern his breakout movie documents to be done with. In Sherman’s March, his torture becomes ours.