ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, February 15, 1997 TAG: 9702190013
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
Documentarian Ken Burns is in the enviable position of being able to make any film he wants.
This week the man who gave television two of its landmarks - ``The Civil War'' and ``Baseball'' - presents the film he wanted to do in the first place, ``Thomas Jefferson,'' a three-hour PBS production airing Tuesday and Wednesday nights (at 9 on WBRA-Channel 15).
Burns is a fortunate filmmaker. The station with which he has a contract, WETA in Washington, D.C., stands behind him, as does General Motors, which for 10 years has been his sole corporate sponsor - even when he gets carried away, as he did with the 18-hour ``Baseball.''
Now, Burns' long-term project, profiling great Americans, begins with a look at the third president of the United States, author of the Declaration of Independence and founder of the University of Virginia.
Unlike Burns' larger television tableaux, this one focuses on a central figure, but unlike the others, it cannot draw upon photographs.
Burns said he had planned to make a documentary about Jefferson years ago, just after he finished his first film, ``Brooklyn Bridge.'' Somehow, he didn't.
``I had spent so many years wanting to do it, but I think [not doing the film earlier] was the best thing. I think I'm at a place now where I understand the emotional tugs, understand him a little less judgmentally. I don't know how it is that we've come in our world to expect a definitive answer, either black or white, yes or no, Democrat or Republican.''
Like other signers of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was a landowner who put everything, including his life, on the line to create the new nation.
Burns presents him as a man of contradictions. He favored small government but doubled the size of the country, buying Louisiana for a sum that was twice the federal budget. He deplored European monarchies and helped lead the American Revolution, yet loved Paris and European culture. He was in politics most of his life and served two terms as president (1801-09), but his gravestone never mentions that. He wrote, ``All men are created equal,'' yet never freed his slaves.
``You need to look at him through the eyes of time and also look at him through our present time,'' Burns said. ``I would rather look at him as a hero in a classical sense, to tolerate the ambiguities and the contradictions; to invite the kind of emotional undertow that the life of Jefferson does; to be disturbed without having a final answer of how his life was; and to proceed from that.
``To get inside Jefferson was not to find an easy categorization that he's good or bad, but to see something much larger. There's something in Jefferson that brings out the best in us. His life is so fascinating, much like our own lives.''
While Burns must work without photography from the period, Jefferson and those around him left many written reflections. Sam Waterston reads from the abundant writings of the tall, soft-spoken Jefferson. Blythe Danner, who played wife, Martha, in the 1972 musical film ``1776,'' gives voice to her here.
Philip Bosco is irascible John Adams, Jefferson's friend and critic throughout their long lives. When Jefferson defeated Adams for the presidency, Adams left town before the inauguration rather than shake hands with him. They later mended their friendship.
Thomas and Martha Jefferson had six children, but only daughter, Martha, called Patsy (voiced by Amy Madigan), lived to full adulthood. Maria, called Polly, died at 25. Danner's daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow, who appeared in the 1995 Merchant-Ivory film ``Jefferson in Paris,'' provides what Burns called ``the mannered voice'' of one of Jefferson's grandchildren who grew up at Monticello.
Michael Potts, Julie Harris, Adam Arkin, Derek Jacobi, Arthur Miller and George Plimpton are among other voices. Ossie Davis, who has given voice to figures in earlier Burns films, narrates.
But among those people in Jefferson's life who are not represented in the film are the many he lost to death: his father, his mother, his favorite sister, his best friend (Dabney Carr), five out of his six children and several grandchildren.
To Burns, whose mother died when he was 11, those losses have resonance.
``I know that's formed me in every way,'' he said. ``Jefferson lived a life of loss, and at the same time had this incredibly optimistic outer personality. And I think a lot of what we've tried to do in the film is see his contradictions, and the traps that he found himself in, in the context of something deeply personal.''
Burns said the thread running through all his films is race, and for that reason, he said, he probably should have started with films on Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, which ignored the issue of slavery and set up the Civil War.
``To me, race is the central story of America,'' said Burns, ``and here is a man who distilled the Enlightenment and wrote that `all men are created equal,' and yet he owned other human beings. How he ignored, how he engaged that question, is exactly how we do now. ... It's just at the center. In `Baseball,' the gigantic underpinning is race. `Baseball' told us what we became.''
Some viewers may quibble over what has been left out. There is nothing, for example, about George Mason, who wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights from which Jefferson borrowed liberally when he constructed the Declaration of Independence. Others will say there's not enough about Sally Hemings, the slave who may have been Martha Jefferson's half-sister, and whose children may have been sired by Jefferson.
Burns acknowledged that there is nothing about Mason but said, ``I am most proud of our Sally Hemings section. The first question you get is, Did he or didn't he? I'm sort of stunned by the parochial nature of our 20th-century mentality, that he may, may not, have had sex with a slave. There's not a proof one way or the other. But he owned her. It's not about sex; it's about ownership.''
Burns blamed an ongoing ``revisionism that shoots Jefferson off the pedestal. Much more difficult is holding to a profoundly ambivalent and ambiguous center, which is closer to human life and what these issues are about. It's so important, particularly in television, which is a notably shallow medium.
``And there's a virtue in restraint. So we sat on our hands about Sally, because we thought the stakes were higher than the National Enquirer. We've been distracted here. I'm not ruling that out, but I put race above sex.''
Burns said his complaint with ``Jefferson in Paris'' was not the fictionalizing of history, but that ``it made the most interesting person in America boring. It made him a thinly contained libido.
``This was an incredibly difficult film to make,'' said Burns. ``You have to make some critical choices. This is not a scholarly work - it's an essay compared to a poem. I've made the decisions. We do this all at our peril. You die, you suffer for that. In the end, you know that that rubble on the studio floor is as important as the sculpture you carved.''
As always in Burns' documentaries, several historians and writers offer their perspectives. One is Clay Jenkinson, author of the upcoming biography ``The Paradox of Thomas Jefferson.'' Others are Gore Vidal, interviewed at his villa in Italy, and George Will, Garry Wills, Daniel Boorstin, Andrew Burstein, John Hope Franklin, Joseph Ellis, Daniel Jordan, Natalie Bober and Paul Finkelman.
LENGTH: Long : 133 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. PBS will air the ``Thomas Jefferson'' special Tuesdayby CNBand Wednesday at 9 p.m. on WBRA-Channel 15. 2. In his documentary,
filmmaker Ken Burns presents Jefferson as a man of contradictions.
Burns is pictured in front of Jefferson's home Monticello.