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"FacebookPinterest\n\nGQ, September 2007\n\nSix years in production and as mournfully patriotic as a coffin made of apple pie, Ken Burns's mammoth sevenpart, fourteenandahalfhour documentary on America in World War II, grandly titled just The War, is definitely the TV event of the fall. It deserves to be. As memorials go, what Burns has wrought is a thousand times more heartfelt and affecting than the ugly, Teutonic thingamabob now potholing the Mall in Washington, D.C. Even so, I do wonder whether, nearly a decade after Steven Spielberg and Tom Brokaw started the flood, we've already gone as far as a country can go in drowning its currentevents sorrows in adulatory nostalgia.\n\nBurns's own view of his intentions is very different; Yet he wouldn't draw such a large audience if he didn't conceive his epics about our past as immense cathartic emotional experiences. Impressive as his gifts are, they aren't analytical\u2014and they're certainly not caustic. Even when the grim combat clips he's dug up speak for themselves, he can't quit gilding the lily, with YoYo Ma sawing pensively at his cello as men fight and die and Tom Hanks overdoing the plumyvoiced Thornton Wilder bit in his readings of a smalltown newspaper editor's reports from Heartland, U.S.A. Did I mention that Norah Jones occasionally croons something called \"American Anthem\" over the credits If Burns weren't so good at leaving viewers awed and weepy at our mighty history\u2014and if I didn't know full well that that's the only way of getting most of them to give a damn\u2014people like me would feel less rotten about asking whether being moved is enough.\n\nThat doesn't mean I'm immune. While you have to go to the series' tiein book to find out, the unidentified GI in its valedictory image is Ken's father, and what can I say A similar picture of Jim Carson, Burns senior's U.S. Navy equivalent, is beaming at me as I tap away. And sure, even from Burns, a title as overweeningly simple as The War is pushing it. (Don't tell my 80yearold mom, though: Without mentioning the documentary's name, I describe it to her on the phone. \"You know,\" she says, \"it drives me crazy when I hear people say 'World War II.' We always called it &amp;amp;#x91;the War.' \") But after he'd followed The Civil War with Baseball and then Jazz, what did you expect him to call his Pearl HarbortoVJ Day opus\u2014Ken Burns and the Deathly Hallows\n\nThe truth is, if PBS had been less eager over the years to peddle him as public broadcasting's answer to Harry Potter\u2014a part he even looks, including hair management that makes John Edwards seem as unkempt as a Bowery bum\u2014then people who kvetch about his taste for grandiosity might have an easier time admitting he's a master at his craft. However ripe for parody, his style is as unmistakable as Martin Scorsese's. Though I'm not altogether sure what he does\u2014he seems to rely on more assistants than Jeff Koons\u2014nobody tops him at making yesteryear haunting.\n\nEven History Channel devotees who think they've seen it all will be sobered by the battle footage, a lot of it in literally bloody color, that floods the screen here. Harrowing in its own right, it's also superbly edited to mesh with the testimony of a wellchosen batch of elderly survivors while conveying\u2014and this is the hard part\u2014the conflict's unimaginable dimension. Compared with the random way most war docs ram in handy battle clips, the attention to place\u2014muddy Italy, pulverized Iwo Jima, creepy Huertgen Forest\u2014is phenomenal. Especially if you know how little real visual documentation exists of the chaos and misery at Omaha Beach (sorry, but I've been hung up on DDay my whole life), the power of Burns's use of it is unprecedented.\n\nAll the same, when he says he's refuting the war's \"bloodless, gallant myth,\" I wonder what time capsule he's been living in. Ever since Saving Private Ryan, horror at the ordeal Dad or Grandpa went through has been the new piety. Making us gape at the carnage is how every film pays tribute and by implication reproaches us for our own petty lives\u2014the point of Brokaw's hack \"Greatest Generation\" coinage. Burns's leg up on Hollywood is that his materials are authentic, and The War does a magnificent job of shoving the war's costs in our faces. But it's still an overembellished, not infrequently syrupy serenade.\n\nGiven burns's track record, it's no surprise his take is unabashedly Americacentric. (The Russians, with their 20 million dead\u2014that's fifty for every one of ours\u2014might be forgiven for rolling their eyes.) Localizing things more, he frames The War as a tale of four communities: Dixiefried, shipbuilding Mobile, Alabama; plucky, ethnic Waterbury, Connecticut; charming, tiny Luverne, Minnesota; and Sacramento, California, home to a sizable\u2014c'mon, guess\u2014JapaneseAmerican population. Still, Burns knows how to modulate from micro to macro, and the individual story lines are woven into the big picture with uncommon artfulness. Because the ancient footage we're seeing dovetails in such detail with the memories of his dozen or so main talking heads\u2014and because viewers can't help realizing that not many future Second World War documentaries will feature firsthand witnesses\u2014watching these placid octogenarians reminisce about long ago and far away feels like sorcery.\n\nThe most likable is Mobile's Katharine Phillips, who put her love life on hold until her brother Sid\u2014also spryly and engagingly on hand\u2014got back from the Pacific. The most touching is Sascha Weinzheimer, who was interned as a girl in Manila and seems to have her 11yearold self (and voice) permanently petrified inside her. The gentlest is Minnesota fighter pilot Quentin Aanenson, whose wartime marriage to his homefront sweetheart, Jackie Greer, gives Burns his central love story; they're still together, and she's in The War, too. The most incredible\u2014just seeing him alive, robust, and chatting away oncamera six and a half decades later is mindboggling\u2014is Glenn Frazier, who survived the Bataan Death March in 1942. The story of his first phone call home after three years as a POW is also a moment of sitcom slapstick I won't spoil, especially since Burns is so short on humor that the only one of Bill Mauldin's famous Willie &amp;amp; Joe cartoons he shows us omits the caption.Holding down Shelby Foote's job as The War's voice of reflection are two veterans who became men of letters: Paul Fussell, author of Wartime and Doing Battle, and Samuel Hynes. The difference is that while Foote's Methuselan charm created a pleasant illusion he'd been there at Gettysburg, Fussell and Hynes really were in Europe and the Pacific. \"Our two ringers,\" Burns calls them, and I've got my own confession: Back when The Gong Show roamed the earth, Hynes was my favorite college professor. I've loved Ulysses ever since, so he's naturally the one I'm rooting for to achieve Footelike stardom. But it's Fussell who owns the series' most vulnerable moment, breaking down as he describes how discovering the Nazi death camps made our GIs realize they'd been fighting the good fight.\n\nIf you know his crusty rep, seeing him in tears is jolting. Yet his presence is also a reminder of some hornets' nests Burns doesn't stir up. A notable contrarian, Fussell has written at length about his abomination of the wartime propaganda that helped spawn the huckster United States of today, his loathing of military chickenshit, and so on. Even when he's oncamera, these are topics The War skirts or omits. For instance, a segment on rationing briefly mentions black markets, including the statistic that an estimated one out of four retail transactions here at home was illegal. But you have to go to Fussell's The Boys' Crusade to learn that the black market in liberated Paris was merrily run by over 2,000 American deserters. That's more than the number of extras in Saving Private Ryan, isn't it\n\nBurns does let Fussell talk about our troops' ineptitude in their early tests against the Germans. But what's unmentioned is his heretical belief that the U.S. Army didn't get much better with practice. In fact, with a beefy assist from Detroit and Boeing, the glum, unaggressive soldiers we shipped off to fight Hitler were just barely good enough to prevail\u2014and that's not to their discredit. I don't know about Ken's father, who looks like a sweet man. Mine taught me to be fonder of a country that's just martial enough to win its wars than one that thinks it's great at them.\n\nEvery warrior Burns shows us is reluctant, and that's admirable. But there isn't a shirker or an operator out for private gain in the bunch, and even if those guys didn't care to be interviewed, it's a valorizing falsification to imply none existed.\n\nThe same goes for a seamy, liberating underside to America's experience of World War II that Burns is too dainty to touch. Most people first heard of The War when Latinos complained about their invisibility in his American tapestry, and the final broadcast version has been augmented to make amends. But maybe ACT UP should have protested, too; as delightful as the Frank Capra lyricism of Quentin Aanenson's marriage to his Jackie is, it is trite as the series' only portrait of the cataclysm's effect on private lives across the social and sexual spectrum. About the closest the series comes to evoking the carousing new freedoms Pearl Harbor unleashed is Sam Hynes's description of the selfish side of signing up: \"It is the opportunity to be somebody more exciting than the kid you are.\"\n\nOn the flip side, the irony of this filmmaker being attacked for racial insensitivity is that he's usually at his toughest and best when race is the topic. It's always the grenade in his patriotic birthday cakes, and some viewers may be surprised by how much The War dwells on not only the Japanese internment but on AfricanAmerica's World War II. What's wrenching is how both groups' patriotism was thwarted: black soldiers' frustration at not getting into combat, images of Nisei kids playing baseball and, in Boy Scout uniforms, raising the Stars and Stripes in the camps. Famously, the segregated Nisei unit that served in Europe, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, ended up as the most decorated U.S. outfit of the war. Burns tells their story well.\n\nThat's why it's even more impressive that The War makes the best case for dropping the atom bomb on Japan of any doc I know. The reason couldn't be more basic; we've been made vividly aware that invasion is the only other option, and we've watched our soldiers, sailors, and Marines go through so many meat grinders from Guadalcanal on that we revolt at the idea of putting them through another. And yes, we quail at sitting through two more hours of The War, too. But that's not meant to be a joke: It's a compliment.\n\nSorry, but size does matter. Over these fourteen hours, Burns does every saccharine, sonorous thing that drives his naysayers up the wall, avoiding hard inquiry in favor of summoning memory's mystic chords and splurging on emotion. I think The War is simpleminded. I think it's unduly obsessed with slaughter \u2014not the fact of it, but the mystique, fetishizing combat as the ultimate crucible when only a cruelly punished fraction of the American military went through anything of the kind. I dread the perfect storm of national selflove it's likely to provoke, especially at a time when clear thinking about our nolongersoManifest Destiny wouldn't come amiss. But by the end, you know you've seen a monument.\n\nIf you can stay dryeyed or less than spellbound, more power to you: You'll make a better historian than Burns one day. But while people can and should argue with his Hallmarkcard notion of history, even a grumpyguts like me can't gainsay his achievement in expressing\u2014and for better and worse, helping to shape\u2014how later generations feel about it. In a perfect world, \"Too much and not enough\" would be my verdict on The War. But I'm only human, and something in me can't help adding, \"Hell, that must mean it's just right.\" My main regret is that only one of my parents is still alive to see it.\n\nTom Carson is a GQ correspondent. To see his musthave DVD picks, click here."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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