Weak

It goes against PBS-fan (though perhaps not Civil-War-buff) orthodoxy to pan this Ken Burns documentary on which so much encomium has been heaped. But it has to be said: The Civil War is thin, irregular, and given it's stupefying length (eleven and a half hours) doesn't come to nearly enough.

Admittedly, Burns doesn't claim to be a historian, or even a journalist - he's a filmmaker, and a well-respected one. He also is quick to point out that this was his first large-scale venture and cheerfully admits he was out of his depth. While his honesty in this regard is touching, it seems pretty clear from the result that his circumstances were intrinsically incompatible with his chosen subject. The only point of talking about the Civil War is to make sense of it - otherwise, it's just an exercise in grim voyeurism where we're invited to look at Matthew Brady's stark photographs and feel the awfulness of war for it's own sake, something any sober adult should understand well enough. Burns, however, is unable to tell the story in a way that makes much sense; nor does he attempt to explain anything adequately; he leaves us to walk unescorted through a shadowy museum where none of the exhibits are labeled, and the only docent seems to be having a rough first day on the job.

It was his game to win. After all, he proposed to document the astonishing and complex story of how the American Experiment was nearly lost in a maelstrom of competing ideologies and fierce emotions, all while Old Europe watched with amused disdain and naked opportunism. While there's plenty of details to mire a would-be documentarian, the Civil War was in fact shaped by a surprisingly small number of factors that can be described, and whose dynamics can be articulated, in even a brief and unacademic study. Bruce Catton does a fine job of this in his canonical one-volume popular history; likewise James MacPherson. Shelby Foote, a novelist who made no claims to being a historian, wrote a well-regarded three-volume narrative history. In retrospect, however, this was perhaps too tall an order for a filmmaker on his own.

Burns seems to fumble at choosing the right details to frame the story, and consequently the rather minimal narration seldom rises to the level of clear explanation; indeed, there are places where it barely qualifies as storytelling. He obviously spent a lot of time and attention on the production per se, but an eleven-and-a-half hour montage of grainy black-and-white (though evocative) photos over spare, melancholy piano music is a bit maddening when the explication is weak or absent.

Occasionally he injects brief footage of novelist Shelby Foote - an appealing storyteller, and a bona-fide expert on the subject - but his screen time is confined mostly to anecdotage. Apart from that, we get a bunch of quotations by figures of wildly variable significance, read to us in disconcerting celebrity voiceovers by Garrison Keillor, Laurence Fishburne, Morgan Freeman, Jeremy Irons, Derek Jacobi, and George Plimpton.

The problem with the American Civil War is that it takes a good deal of accounting for. A further difficulty for any documentarian arises from the need to dispel popular misconceptions, or rather to frame certain popular notions (e.g., that the war was "about slavery") in a more sophisticated context to preserve the real meaning. Setting aside the familiar stuff of pop history books - detailed examinations of battles, caricatured politicians and generals, all the tedious hagiographies of Lee and Lincoln, the Lost Cause, etc. - there's a general explanation that is neither beyond the grasp of a typical PBS enthusiast, or the scope of a nearly-twelve-hour documentary.

Burns doesn't provide it though, and his Civil War seems mysterious and ineffable. It didn't need to be. Several well-regarded one-volume histories do a fine job of explicating the arguments over states' rights, the issue of slavery, the cultural clash of old-world Southern aristocracy versus the liberalizing and egalitarian experiment of the North, and the impact of the war on American history and culture.

In sum: sense can be made of this subject, but Burns' documentary doesn't come close, and it drags.