A founding father gets the Ken Burns treatment in PBS’ ‘Benjamin Franklin’
To many, Ben Franklin was a name on the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, a bespectacled statesman whose inquisitive though skeptical gaze resonated through the centuries on portraits in museums and government buildings across the country. But to Ken Burns, he’s a man of contradictions whose monumental accomplishments and alltoo-human foibles make him the quintessential American, as he posits in his latest filmmaking effort for PBS.
In “Benjamin Franklin,” a four-hour documentary that airs Monday and Tuesday, Burns brings forth the human side of arguably the most consequential U.S. figure of the 18th century, a diplomat, philosopher, writer and publisher as well as a groundbreaking scientist and inventor who is credited with being a chief architect of freedom and democracy.
But while he was deeply committed to the ideals of the Enlightenment, always looking to improve himself, his community and humanity at large, he also could be shrewdly calculating, prejudiced
and unforgiving. And though he became an abolitionist later in life, he had at least six slaves.
Burns brings to life Franklin’s story through comments from writers, scholars and experts, paintings and period texts read by narrator Peter Coyote and Mandy Patinkin, who voices Franklin.
It’s a story, the filmmaker believes, still resonates more
than 200 years later.
“Working in history, you really have a sense that you have the possibility to speak not about past events, but you’re always speaking — because human nature doesn’t change — about the present,” Burns said. “So, there is a kind of continual conversation that takes place between the human beings that we think are
anachronistic and different — they have powdered wigs, they dress funny, all of that — and who are exactly the same as us. Therefore, I think the study of history offers us a dispassionate and at the same time an incredibly focused, mesmerizingly focused view on what’s going on now. …
“And I think that it is possible for us to go back as dis
tant in American history as we can with this film and feel that on every page, every frame, that we are rhyming, as Mark Twain would say, with the present.”
As for Patinkin, whose accomplishments include three Tony nominations, seven Emmy nods and one win, taking on a voice from the distant past like Franklin’s was a daunting task but
one he took on with excitement.
“I consider getting to be his voice … one of the privileges of my artistic life,” he said. “I really just focused and learned that some of it almost sounds like a foreign language at times, but I wanted to understand what was being said, what were the ideas at hand.”