Ken Burns is one of those people whose achievements appear to diminish in retrospect, and whose later work reveals the faults of their earlier efforts. After sitting through the whole eighteen-and-a-half-hour stretch of “Baseball,” you can hardly help looking back at “The Civil War” and reflecting on the essential falseness of that soulful solo violin and catch-in-the-throat reading of letters whose pathos resided entirely in what subsequently happened to their authors. Yes, Ken, we know it is all very sad, but being sad is not what it was for. Somehow we never found out quite so much about that rather important question as a true history should have told us.
“Baseball,” at half again the length of “The Civil War,” is self-parody. Instead of the “Ashokan Farewell,” there is a seemingly endless series of different arrangements of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” The well-tried formula of “The Civil War,” with lots of sepia-tinted photographs displayed against a background of plangent piano music and lugubrious narration, has now become a cliché, a sort of PBS house style. A couple of weeks after “Baseball” had run its seemingly interminable course, I tuned in a documentary on FDR and, hearing again that mournful piano and seeing Doris Kearns Goodwin talking, thought for a moment that they had decided to repeat “Baseball” instead.
Yes, Ken, we know it is all very sad, but being sad is not what the Civil War was for.
