More typically, the film cannot make the Great Plains seem as startling to us as they were to Lewis and Clark.Īdam Arkin is appropriately somber and thoughtful as he reads from Lewis's extraordinary journals. When the Corps of Discovery stops for the winter, building Fort Mandan, scenes of an empty, frozen landscape in North Dakota effectively convey its harsh battle against nature. Burns's strategy in ''Lewis and Clark'' succeeds.
''The Civil War,'' after all, was built around photographs ''Thomas Jefferson'' relied on a wealth of visual substitutes, from Jefferson's architectural drawings to Monticello itself. But the lack of photographs from the expedition's era remains a serious problem. The film includes some photographs taken decades later, notably of Indians, buildings and landscapes that had changed little. Burns's fascination, it preaches to the converted and fails to convey a sense of the expedition as a dynamic adventure. Yet, with its assumption that every viewer shares Mr. ''Lewis and Clark'' includes all this and far more. They saw mystifying creatures we now call jack rabbits, antelope and prairie dogs, and documented 122 kinds of animals and 178 species of plants Easterners had never seen. They encountered helpful Mandan Indians and hostile Sioux. Along the way, they opened the West and kept meticulous, fascinating records. They were searching for what turned out to be the nonexistent Northwest Passage, a water route linking the Atlantic with the Pacific. They set out from the Missouri River in 1804, arriving at the Pacific a year and a half and many surprises later. President Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and the group called the Corps of Discovery to go, literally, off the map.
The journey and its players were astonishing. Ambrose's fine 1996 book, ''Undaunted Courage,'' an unlikely best seller. Some people approach the 19th-century explorers with worshipful obsession, and there is enough interest in them to make Stephen E. The Continental Divide is nothing next to the division between those who dismiss Lewis and Clark as a bad classroom memory and those who are part of what can honestly be called their cult. There are other obstacles built into the subject. There are more shots of sun-dappled rivers, more banjo and fiddle music here than any film should have to bear. Burns has arrived at the point where his style has become a nervous tic.
After such invigorating triumphs as ''The Civil War,'' ''The West'' and ''Thomas Jefferson,'' Mr. But as it chronicles an adventure that predated photography, ''Lewis and Clark'' relies on so many contemporary nature scenes that it resembles a National Geographic special.
The director applies his trademark style: old artwork, fresh photography, actors reading from letters and journals of the period. (The two-part program begins tonight on PBS.) There you have the essential problem with Ken Burns's lovingly made but wrongheaded film, ''Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery.'' The pictures are rarely equal to the subject. Yet as Matthew Broderick reads those words, what we see on the television screen is a prettily filmed, bland image of a distant hill in what is now Idaho. ''Some of the places are so steep that some of our horses fell backwards and rolled 20 or 30 feet among the rocks,'' a soldier named John Ordway wrote of his trek across the Bitterroot Mountains with Lewis and Clark.
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