Ken Burns is more closely associated with the tweed jacket crowd than the bohemian, blowing dust off antiquarian events so that public access television has something to program around November each year — a stuffy academic who puts vegetables on our moviegoing plates. But it’s time we flip the conversation on him: he’s proven himself a true-blue artist over the course of his 44-year career, one who’s contributed as much to the development of our visual language as D.W. Griffith. His style is synonymous with the documentary form itself.
Burns is best known for his all-encompassing documentaries about major inflection points in American history, but his focus has grown narrower in recent years — his last truly epic production was 2019’s Country Music (although if Country ain’t your thing, then the last major one was The Vietnam War), and so much about America has changed since then. Covid-19 ravaged our population, Trump’s ascendency was confirmed not to be an aberration, and mass shootings became the foregone collateral damage for our second amendment rights meeting a mental health epidemic the likes of which we have never seen. We’re falling through the cracks, and new ones are opening up every single day. Burns’ latest, The American Revolution, seeks to examine the fault lines that opened those cracks. But Ken Burns will not be the one to save us from our current predicament: he doesn’t diagnose a sickness at the center of the American soul in The American Revolution, nor offer an antidote. Instead, he plays it ramrod straight, touching the third rail of our nation’s founding with nary a blink.
The story of the American Revolution has been so widely disseminated — and annotated, and edited, and defaced — that to hold a magnifying glass to it upon its 250th anniversary is to openly embrace recrimination, and the fact that Burns acknowledges the stains of slavery, stolen land, and women’s subjugation at all — to say nothing of his detours into George Washington’s inveterate racism — will surely set off red alarms of revisionism for traditionalists (i.e., chauvinists). Yet if The American Revolution is revisionist, then it’s the kind of revisionism wherein forgotten histories are brought to light not to undermine but to bolster what we already know. It’s not Burns’ Killers of the Flower Moon — that would be The American Buffalo — but it starts with the assumption that the Revolutionary War is our creation myth and spends 12 hours humanizing it.
It’s far more interesting that way, bringing the Revolution to a place where we can understand the motivations and machinations of those who participated. Burns gives the Revolution a globe-spanning, top-to-bottom dramatic arc, from Benjamin Franklin to forgotten fifer John Greenwood. Burns bounces between his characters with typical ease — the power of juxtaposition being one of his great underrated talents — weaving their correspondences and diary entries with well-timed expert interviews. The interviewees have gotten more buttoned-up as Burns has aged — one yearns for the mellifluous digressions of a Shelby Foote or the eccentricity of a Stanley Crouch — but each of the Revolution’s contemporaneous characters gets their own unique voice.
One of the pleasures of watching a Ken Burns documentary is identifying the actors he enlists to play these characters — it’s the closest supernerds ever get to participating in something like a drinking game. “Is that Tom Hanks?” one might ask in quiet disbelief while pointing to the screen. “Laura Linney? Ethan Hawke? Samuel L. Jackson? Meryl Fucking Streep?” The number of all-time great actors lending their talents here is honestly astounding. Josh Brolin brings a roughneck gravity to his George Washington, and Paul Giammati fits into John Adams like hand in glove (even as he isn’t given the material to work with that would empower him to match his performance — in all seriousness one of his very best — as Teddy Roosevelt in The Roosevelts: An Intimate History). Others, like Edward Norton, don’t fare as well: some voices just don’t belong to the 18th century.
That’s musket fire you can lob at Burns’ style, too. In the director’s greatest work, like Frank Lloyd Wright, his patient and unfussy images take on an element of transcendence. Here, his cutaways read more like stock footage than carefully choreographed reenactments. Precious close-ups of hand lifting hand over a ridge, shallow frames positioned at the edges of bayonets, and swooping drone shots don’t help us to identify with the faceless bodies we see trudging through America’s vast wilderness circa 1776 — it’s not much more creative than what you’d see in the lobby at a local museum. To make up for it, Burns pans and scans — i.e., Ken Burnses — over paintings depicting major Revolutionary battles. The paintings are so varied and expressionistic that the movie becomes its own piece of art criticism, detailing how different works expressed different aspects of the revolutionary spirit. They bring the Revolution to rich, colorful life, and give us a great feel for what it might have been like on the ground: the swell of violin and the right sound design as the camera tracks over John Trumball’s The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton is as good as a $100 million budget.
But there’s a lot of military history in The American Revolution, and it can’t all be depicted in oils. Burns will often throw to a computer-generated map of the United States, drawing blue and red arrows to orient us as we swing through vast campaigns. It makes complex tactical maneuvers legible, particularly for those of us who find parsing battle coordination akin to calculus, and it helps us understand why, despite constant blunders and patterns of retreat, the American army could have possibly defeated the British. For better or worse, it plays a little like a glossier Historia Civilis, which says a lot about how documentary filmmaking in the digital era has caught up with Burns, and in some ways left him behind.
The American Revolution continues to exhibit the values — both aesthetic and moral — that have guided Burns to create some of our nation’s very best documentaries. Jazz remains not only the definitive statement on the musical genre, but on America as it entered the modern age; Muhammad Ali rivetingly captures America at the crossroads of TV culture and revolutionary politics in the 1960s; The National Parks argues successfully for the continued preservation of our natural land. They all work because of Burns’ essential mid-20th century liberalism: “To believe in America, rooted in the American Revolution, is to believe in possibility,” historian Jane Kamensky notes at the beginning of Episode Six. But when watching The American Revolution, one can’t help but wonder whether the landscape has transformed too much for this brand of liberalism to hold.
The American Revolution skirts the political history it takes on faith we know already and nods to it with Spielbergian treacle, offering itself as a companion to Hamilton rather than a sober rejoinder. Burns’ uncritical praise of democracy here — extending as far as derisively quoting British General Thomas Gage’s view of it as a despotic breeding ground for demagogues without once entertaining the possibility that it could be true — rings hollow at a moment in our history where the guardrails of the system are being filed away to the point of snapping. The film is certainly of interest for its general historical and entertainment value — there’s a great deal to learn, and plenty to keep us interested — but it fails to make a case for its utopian vision of America at this particular juncture in the country’s political life.
The American Revolution feels like a transmission from a different America, an America that isn’t fully burned out by political abuse and actually has the mental bandwidth to sit down and watch a 12-hour documentary about its founding, not just listen to it while doing the dishes or play it picture-in-picture on 2x speed while doomscrolling. Burns needed to work overtime here to combat the disaffection and enervation dominating the zeitgeist; instead, he seemingly stumbled through the project with his fingers in his ears. “Alexander Hamilton was concerned an unprincipled man would mount the hobby horse of popularity and throw things into confusion,” Peter Coyote narrates in the meager 10-minute stretch dedicated to the writing, signing, and adoption of the Constitution. “‘In a government like ours,’ [Hamilton] would write, ‘no one is above the law.’” This comes across, quite simply, as naïve, and still Burns doubles down in a whiplash-inducing final montage that manages to be at once both buoyant and self-serving, cavorting across history with the unchallenged assertion that America is the light that never goes out. It’s true that hope never goes out of style, yet it can also be abused, and paying lip service to a continued struggle at the very end doesn’t undo the havoc wrought on our nation by neoconservatism and neoliberalism. “The Revolution is not over,” Edward Norton insists as a young girl looks on at fireworks exploding over the Brooklyn Bridge. But when The American Revolution is over, Burns’ America is nowhere in sight.
DIRECTOR: Ken Burns; CAST: Josh Brolin, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Jeff Daniels, Tom Hanks, Claire Danes, Laura Linney, Paul Giamatti; DISTRIBUTOR: PBS; STREAMING: November 16; RUNTIME: 12 hr.
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