TV REVIEW : ‘Odyssey’ Can Only Offer a Taste of Dos Passos’ Life

No one-hour film can possibly hope to encompass and make sense of a major artist’s life, but it can provide a taste, an aroma, a sample of the artist’s world. “The Odyssey of John Dos Passos” tries, but can’t give us the whole man. It does, more modestly, give us that taste of Dos Passos.

His odysseys were several: From ashamed bastard child to supremely confident novelist of “U.S.A.”; from bitter observer of bloody World War I to gallivanting friend of Paris bohemians, patrons and artists; from strident socialist to strident anti-communist.

There was another, which this film poorly describes: Beginning as a conventional writer with the usual approach to linear narrative, Dos Passos exploded out of this shell, much as his friend Pablo Picasso exploded out of figurative painting to explore Cubism.

This condensed portrait is better at describing the events and ideas swirling around the writer than the actual work itself. Thus, each 20th-Century decade is framed in a mock newsreel of key events, and the montage of 1920s industrialism nicely suggests the “machine” of capitalism that Dos Passos saw devouring the common man. (Another montage of New York is a paltry visual accompaniment to William Hurt’s superb reading of Dos Passos’ propulsive novel, “Manhattan Transfer.”)

Because he filled his novels with his politics, and because the massive “U.S.A.” was a monument of leftist literature, Dos Passos’ eventual shift to the right was a seismic-like event in his life.

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He was perhaps in a better position than his peers on the artistic left to condemn communism, since he had spent time in the Soviet Union, observed Stalin’s power firsthand and then Soviet influence on anti-facists in the Spanish civil war.

History proved Dos Passos correct, twice. The “robber barons” were a cancer on American democracy, and Stalinism was Soviet communism’s evil final act.

This “Odyssey” aptly concludes that Dos Passos was beyond right and left, that he was a libertarian anarchist who hated power of any sort.

He was also a writer too big for the television screen.

* “The Odyssey of John Dos Passos” airs 10 p.m. tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28; 7 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24.