Mr. Burns is willing to risk obviousness because his project is not to find surprising twists on American history. It’s to create a historical canon in the most broadly acceptable terms.
This might in part be public-TV centrism, but it’s also an ideology. Mr. Burns’s films assume that it’s still possible for Americans to have an agreed-on baseline — on government, war, race and culture — from which to go forward.
In relatively peaceful times, this approach could seem banal, as if the films are arguing for pieties that everyone already agrees on. In — well, times like now — it can seem naïve to think that there’s any fact so unobjectionable it can’t be litigated by opposed camps. In the divides the war rended, you can see the swellings of today’s impenetrable political bubbles.
The saddest thing about this elegiac documentary may be the credit it extends its audience. “The Vietnam War” still holds out hope that we might learn from history, after presenting 18 hours of evidence to the contrary.
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