From
New York Magazine:
Ken Burns's The Address
(PBS, 9 p.m. April 15, 2014) is just unusual enough that I wish it were
better, but it's still so unusual — peculiar, even — that I'm
recommending it. The advertising imagery suggests it's a film about the
meaning of the Gettysburg Address, a 272-word passage in American
politics that's arguably the piece of writing that most defines the U.S.
Civil War. This is a subject tailor-made for Burns, who broke through
to national prominence with his PBS miniseries The Civil War and
went on to become public TV's virtual Smithsonian institution, curating
our historical memory for us, with and without fiddle music.
The Address, however, features none of the oft-parodied
Burns storytelling techniques. It's really a documentary about the
Greenwood School in Putney, Vermont, which houses 50 boys ages 11 to 17
who have various learning disabilities, including
dyslexia, dysgraphia, executive function,
and ADHD. With help from teachers, administrators, and advisors, the
boys try to overcome their problems in order to memorize the Gettysburg
Address. This is apparently a tradition at the school. The documentary
genuflects in the direction of the "ticking clock" genre by telling us
how many weeks are left until all the boys have to recite the Address,
but its tone is unhurried to the point of being relaxed. Even though the
story of the kids and the school is sometimes interrupted by factoids
about President Lincoln's most famous bit of writing and the historical
circumstances that birthed it — backed with music and voice-over
narration performed by the students — the titular paragraph is just an
excuse to tell us about the students' learning disabilities, what they
mean in everyday terms, and what can be done to manage them.
Along the way we also get lots of fly-on-the-wall scenes of the
teachers working with the kids and zeroing in on their own distinct
difficulties. One boy has trouble keeping focused. Another stumbles over
particular words or phrases. Another seems fixated on his version of
order, is annoyed that the Gettysburg Address doesn't fit it, points to a
particularly irksome phrase, and asks the teacher, "Why can't you just
switch it around?" If you have a friend or family member with a
disability, you already know a lot of what The Address has to
say, but if you've been untouched by this particular set of challenges,
this might be an eye-opening primer. A school therapist tells us that
for many of these kids, memorizing and accurately reciting 272 words is
"the ultimate, difficult thing."
The Address is also Burns's loosest documentary in a long
while. Eschewing the minimalistic formal control he usually brings to
every topic — a toolkit of shots, cuts, and music cues as tight and
regimented as Stanley Kubrick's or Wes Anderson's — he takes a 1960s
observer approach, watching kids from far away with a zoom lens as they
do their work. There are some wonderful caught moments, including a
mini-montage of the kids snowboarding and sledding, and a cutaway from
two kids studying the Address that reveals the underside of the desk,
where one boy's sock feet are nervously swinging. The movie feels too
long, padded even, but its relaxed vibe and non-cloying tone are a
tonic.
