Hour after poetic hour, the tone ranges from reverential to rhapsodic, the images from sublime to glorious. The whole enterprise isn’t just about how America came to set aside certain beautiful spaces as national parks, but about how the embrace of wildness is a religious, patriotic requirement.
Ken Burns strikes again with “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” his most spiritually inclined work yet: a six-part, 12-hour ode to natural wonder and the idea of saving park spaces for the people.
The film will air in two-hour segments over six consecutive days, beginning today at 2 p.m. on KRMA- Channel 6 (repeated at 8 and 10 tonight), continuing evenings at 8 through Friday.
Bringing eccentric personalities to the foreground, Burns relates the political, economic and deeply spiritual quests that kept the country’s most awesome places from being overrun with franchises from sea to shining sea.
“The National Parks” joins the Burns pantheon of epic documentaries celebrating uniquely American inventions. Like jazz and baseball, the invention of national parks distinguished America from Europe, and the filmmaker never tires of reiterating how and why.
It’s not just that Old Faithful is amazing, the Grand Canyon is breathtaking or Yosemite Falls is gorgeous. Again and again, we’re reminded it’s not just about the scenery. In Burns’ telling, the very mud, rock and sequoias stand for democratic principles in a land that doesn’t reserve the best views for aristocrats and monarchs.
The fact that the film’s prose tends toward the purple, like those mountains’ majesty, comes with the territory.
“The National Parks” ranks right behind Burns’ masterpiece “The Civil War” (1990) as a profoundly resonant television archive, an exploration seeking the national character.
Sometimes the poetry is pushy, the narration overwrought. But the pictures!
Filmmed over six years, and charting the evolution of the park idea from the mid-1800s over 150 years to the founding of 58 national parks, the story is graced by stunning cinematography and marred by sometimes repetitve, overreaching language.
The essence of the 12 hours is summed up by Theodore Roosevelt’s argument that the parks represent democracy. They are “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” as Yellowstone’s entry says. Not just places but “geographies of memory and hope,” as radical an idea as the Declaration of Independence.
Our own Old World sites
“There was a sense that in Europe, you had the Roman coliseum or Notre Dame or the Cologne cathedral, but we didn’t have anything like that in America,” Burns’ longtime collaborator Dayton Duncan says on camera. “But we did have these spectacular natural landscapes that were as unique and ancient as anything in the Old World. So they would become our treasures. They would be the source of our national pride. But unlike in Europe, they did not belong to monarchs or nobility. They belong to everyone.”
While Peter Coyote’s soft-spoken narration sets the tone, the most memorable on-screen voice belongs to Shelton Johnson, an African-American who grew up in Detroit, where the national parks seemed far away and unreachable until he later became a park ranger. Johnson’s easy eloquence, describing his first encounter with the frosty exhale of buffalo breath hanging in the air, is quite moving.
A senior husband-and-wife team who scaled Mount McKinley as young explorers, a former ranger who was born in Zion and grew up with the valley, and writer Terry Tempest Williams are among those who lend artful descriptions. National parks are “places of pilgrimage,” Williams says. “We save them, they save us.”
As in his films “Baseball” in 1994, “Jazz” in 2001, Burns bears down on single human obsessions to illuminate the national soul. This time he’s found it in the woods. He starts to sound like John Muir himself, the great mountain prophet and crusader who championed leaving nature well enough alone.
Somewhere in the sixth hour, Duncan, who doubles as writer and talking head, gets tearful as he describes watching “new land” being born from lava in Kilauea, Hawaii. His words mingle with those of Mark Twain, an early visitor who launched his career by describing the volcano. Much of the poetry in the piece is from letters and journals, read by offscreen actors in Burns’ familiar style. (Tom Hanks, Sam Waterston, John Lithgow and Eli Wallach are among them.)
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau are represented. Teddy Roosevelt is a prominent player, both as a hunter and protector of the wildlife; Frederick Law Olmstead (who planned New York’s Central Park) and Steven Mather, who made his fortune in Borax and then advocated for a National Park Service, get their due.
Mather realized it would take a huge public relations campaign to save the parks: “nothing dollar-able is safe,” he warned. A few dollar-minded players stand out, like the enterprising Kolb Brothers who exploited early tourism at the Grand Canyon. A consistent refrain is the fight to keep sacred places from becoming the next Niagra Falls, famously over-commercialized.
Mostly, the interconnectedness of man and nature beams through in the stunning views, the worshipful language and the evocation of Eden.
Burns’ documentaries reliably draw huge ratings spikes for PBS. It will be interesting to see if this one does as much for park attendance.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
