Thoughtful and impeccable: Ken Burns’s Hemingway reviewed

Ken Burns made his name in 1990 with The Civil War, the justly celebrated 11-and-a-half-hour documentary series that gave America’s proudly niche PBS channel the biggest ratings in its history. Since then, he’s tackled several other big American subjects like jazz, Prohibition and Vietnam; and all without ever changing his style. In contrast to, say, Adam Curtis (another ambitious film-maker whose methods have remained unchanged for 30 years), Burns’s documentaries take an almost defiantly considered approach, forgoing anything resembling self-regarding flashiness in favour of such old-school techniques as knowledgeable talking heads, careful chronology and straightforwardly appropriate visuals.

Hemingway, his new six-parter being shown on BBC4, duly fails to mark a radical change in direction. Burns’s regular narrator Peter Coyote declaims a thoughtful, impeccably researched script with due solemnity and a firm commitment to apposite quotation. A not-hugely-varied assortment of writers and academics (some captioned simply ‘literary scholar’) ponder Ernest Hemingway’s contribution to American letters. The photographs and clips match everything we hear with unfussy precision.

Even so, the most striking similarity between Hemingway and Burns’s previous work is how right he is to have enough confidence in his subject matter to proceed with such unhurried aplomb. Or, in short, how great it is.

Of course, the sheer eventfulness of Hemingway’s life helps too. Brought up by a classic combination of depressed father and domineering mother in the Chicago suburbs, by the age of 17 young Ernest was already working for the Kansas City Star at a time when the city was convulsed by violent strikes. A year later, he joined a first world war Red Cross unit in Italy and was delivering cigarettes to the front line when a shell exploded close by, leaving him with more than 220 shrapnel wounds — and that was before his stretcher was machine-gunned.