TELEVISION REVIEW : Rather Bland Portrayal of Melting Pot

During “America Becoming” (at 9 tonight on KPBS, Channel 15), if the viewer is struck with a case of deja vu , it’s understandable. This bland, static survey of American multiculturalism in six cities and towns sends out echoes of those educational films we had to sit through in grade school: The message was good for you, but the movie was so boring that it didn’t matter.

Yet “America Becoming” is directed and photographed by a real artist, not an educational film hack. Charles Burnett, whose “Killer of Sheep” and “To Sleep With Anger” have established him as one of the country’s most expressive, independently minded black filmmakers, points his camera at the country’s vast polyglot of old and recent cultures and immigrants. But unlike his fictional inventions, “America Becoming” lacks any vitality, passion or wit (narrator Meredith Vieira’s voice blends right in, sounding nearly robotic).

Above all, as the film travels from Kansas’ Garden City to Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami and L.A.’s own Monterey Park, a bland optimism persists that, despite barriers of language and custom, folks will learn to get along.

The exception is a persistent pattern of blacks left behind in the marathon to get ahead, the legacy of slavery unknown to any other immigrant group. Yet Burnett finds only one example of racial hostility--Monterey Park’ former white mayor, resentful of non-English business signs--in a culture riven by as many multiethnic conflicts as at any time in American history.

Burnett finished his film many months ago (it screened at this spring’s AFI Festival), and in the meantime have come the Rodney King debacle and New York’s tragic Crown Heights riots pitting African-Americans and new Carribean emigres versus Hassidic Jews. The temperature of race relations has risen dramatically, leaving “America Becoming” already behind the times. By not addressing the latest events, it’s a “topical” film that’s nearly irrelevant.