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.