I saw this movie years ago. It is different. He starts off tracking Sherman's march through the South but keeps getting distracted with all these women and he ends up trying to meet Burt Reynolds. All the while he is haunted by a vision of nucleur war.
"For his first feature-length documentary, Ross McElwee wanted to focus on General William Tecumseh Sherman’s bloody march through the South during the height of the Civil War and explore the cultural implications of that march on the people that currently live below and around the Mason Dixon. Sherman’s March is very much that film, but it’s also about McElwee’s search for romantic and sexual fulfillment. Throughout this two-hour-plus dream of a film, McElwee keeps reminding himself that he needs to return to the subject of General Sherman. I don’t know if he’s short-changing himself or his audience, nor do I know when these seemingly self-flagellating asides were recorded during the filmmaking process, but you get the sense that McElwee knew all along that he was always actively dealing with the memory of General Sherman, regardless of whether his camera was ogling a woman swimming in a lake or a preacher discussing the triumph of the spirit over the body.
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Throughout Sherman’s March, McElwee meets and reconnects with a series of female friends and potential flames, from a struggling actress hell-bent on starring in a Burt Reynolds film to a woman who seems to live by the mantra Thoreau laid out in Walden. Every story that reaches McElwee’s ears, however directly or indirectly (female inmates escaping a mental institution; the would-be actress’s Tarzan-meets-Venus screenplay idea), becomes part of a dream-like cultural tapestry sewed together from the ravages of Sherman’s journey. When the erudite Winnie casually asks Ross whether he thinks Sherman’s march to the sea was an attempt to show that he wasn’t a failure, you realize for the first time that McElwee is a stand-in for the general. The only difference is that the filmmaker doesn’t leave thousands dead in his wake, merely broken hearts and missed opportunities."
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/click/movie-1050454/reviews.php?critic=all&sortby=default&page=1&rid=1268965