DOMESTICATED DARING

By JAMES COLLINS

Lewis and Clark--the names rise dimly from an elementary school textbook along with an illustration of two white men in a canoe. Explorers. The Northwest Passage. Something to do with Vasco da Gama?

It is one achievement of Ken Burns' that his latest documentary for PBS helps rescue two heroic figures from the limbo of sixth-grade history. (Undaunted Courage, the recent bestseller by Stephen Ambrose, had already begun their rehabilitation, and Ambrose appears in the film.) Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, which will be shown in two-hour segments on Nov. 4 and 5, smoothly relates the story of the first expedition to cross the West and reach the Pacific Ocean. The familiar Burns techniques are here--actors reading letters, a cast of commentators, panning shots of historical images--but they are supplemented by the spectacular landscapes of the Great Plains, the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest. It is a pleasing package, nevertheless marred by the Burnsian sensibility.

In May 1804, Meriwether Lewis, his friend William Clark and four dozen other men set off on an expedition that would take them almost 2 1/2 years to complete. Their mission was to study the unexplored lands along the Missouri River and to find a water passage to the Pacific. They traveled upstream the entire length of the Missouri, a distance of 2,700 miles. They crossed the Rockies, having expected mountains no more daunting than the Appalachians. When the screen shows peaks stretching to the horizon, you feel their shock and despair. Suddenly they knew that the Northwest Passage was a chimera and that the mission would become inconceivably arduous. Yet Lewis and Clark succeeded in leading their men to the Pacific and back home with only one fatality (caused by a burst appendix). On their return they were treated as heroes.

The visuals are good, the story is good, so what is the problem with Lewis & Clark? The problem is its overall tone and often soppy commentary; in other words, the problem is most of what Burns brings to the project beyond what geography and history have provided. Burns throws the same cloak of sentimentality and earnestness over every subject he takes on--it's not a cloak, actually, it's more like a Shetland sweater that softens and domesticates powerful events--and Lewis & Clark is no exception.

We hear too many platitudes: "It's everybody's story. An American story." The mournful piping and fiddle playing from Burns' previous films have returned--but why? Lewis' life ended sadly, but what does such plaintive music have to do with this daring, ultimately triumphant mission? As the narrator, Hal Holbrook strikes the same note of puny nostalgia. Even the scenery, while wonderful to look at, is often shot too delicately. Where's the sense of adventure, the wildness, the smell of buffalo grease? This is a story we want Jack London to tell us, but we get M. Scott Peck.

Despite protestations about its heroes' greatness, Lewis & Clark may actually not do them justice. At the end of The Great Gatsby (to switch writers for a moment), F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote of the Dutch sailors who encountered the "fresh green breast of the new world." What those sailors were to Europeans, Lewis and Clark were to Americans. They explored the extreme, forbidding, literally awe-inspiring territories that for Americans were the New World and that are still thought of as emblematic of America. This was no nurturing green breast, however; it was the broad, muscled back of the country, indifferent and untender. If you don't pay too much attention, Lewis & Clark can be engaging as a historical travelogue; but for the passion and meaning of its explorers' achievements, you will have to look elsewhere.