Mark Twain - A Film Directed by Ken Burns

Rating:
Summary: I've Fallen In Love with Mark Twain
Review: You can't ask more of a documentary filmmaker than to make you love the hero of his work as much as he does. I was actually disappointed that I'd never gotten to meet Twain or see him perform in public. There is only a very tiny amount of moving film footage on Twain extant so Burns has to present Twain with stills. That is potentially dry and dull territory when watching a film. Burns makes it work though by interspersing lots of methods of treatment. The interviews with "experts" about Twain are of the highest caliber with the observations by Arthur Miller, William Styron and Hal Holbrook being the most perceptive ones. Miller's observation that artists and writers make terrible business people because they have an excess of imagination had me thinking for days! The actor who supplied Twain's voice and read his work off camera does such a convincing job that I was convinced it was Twain talking to me even though I knew that was impossible. Burns's "Jazz" was a flawed but worthy work and now I'm watching the one about Frank Lloyd Wright. Much as I like Wright's work, I dislike him as a person so cannot fully immerse myself as I did in the Twain. Burns' "Lewis & Clark" was my favorite work of his prior to the Mark Twain work and now this has become my #1 Ken Burns documentary. There are a lot of good extras on the dvd too but the work itself is so superb that it is just extra frosting.