You Say You Want a Revolution

It’s exciting, it’s suspenseful, it’s a big Boston Tea Party of a PBS event. So give me “Liberty!” or give me nothing!

Airing here in three parts, this documentary about the Revolutionary War is that dazzling--a great old story retold smartly and captivatingly with folk melodies, splendid reenactments, historians’ lively comments and costumed actors addressing the camera persuasively as both 18th century VIPs and ordinary citizens.

Together they dust off and energize events that have been hibernating in books and brains, and affirm how much of a kick history can be.

War then was still largely theater governed by gentlemanly rules. “Liberty! The American Revolution” portrays not only the pomp and grandness, though, but also the gore and festering agonies of this family political argument-turned-blood-feud that begins militarily with a clash of rebel militia and British troops on Lexington Green, after which there is no turning back. And yes, Paul Revere rides again.

What you find here is resilience--a regionally fractured revolution somehow staggering forward while often near collapse--and suffering, on both sides. The latter is a story that the filmmakers often tell artfully through topography, a close-up of a wagon wheel sinking into muck, for example, symbolizing British troops slogging through a treacherous strip of American countryside.

You also find wit, as in accounts of Ben Franklin at his spinmeister best lobbying for support in Paris, and in historian N.A.M. Rodger sniffing dryly about the arrogant British Gen. John Burgoyne: “Very competent playwright, Burgoyne. Better playwright than general.”

And you find biting ironies, the biggest that of wealthy American gentry fighting for their liberty while enslaving much of the black population, a contradiction the British try mightily to exploit. Historian Margaret Washington describes the “freedom march” of blacks joining British forces. As it turned out, blacks fought on both sides in what’s described here as the most integrated U.S. war prior to the 20th century.

Gleaming American history films are a PBS signature in a big-budget franchise all but owned by the celebrated Ken Burns. It’s Muffie Meyer and Ellen Hovde, however, who have superbly produced and directed the six hours of “Liberty!,” and Catherine Allan is executive producer. They resurrect to vibrant life the politics, intrigues, misreadings, social posturings, arm-twistings, squabbles and battlefield rumbles that forged creation of the United States.

The American Revolution was that rare war in which ideas were an underpinning, making the rebellion especially hard for the British to crush. Like the French in Indochina and the Americans in Vietnam some two centuries later, one historian notes, “you keep on winning the battles, but they’re winning the war.”

Yet “Liberty!” treats the new nation’s formation and survival as anything but inevitable, and the victory of these rebellious British subjects over King George’s military machine, with critical aid from France, as an equally long shot.

One could argue that what today’s myopic Americans need least is another sprawling saga about themselves. At the very least, though, “Liberty!” sets the United States in a global landscape that enables us to better picture ourselves in relationship to others.

This was, after all, largely a family spat, as historian Rodger notes, articulating the British view: “The Americans weren’t foreigners. They were Englishmen, Scotsmen. They were the king’s subjects. Deluded, perhaps. Misguided, troublesome, turbulent, inconvenient, but not foreigners, not an enemy.”

An enemy they became, however. The story here begins with the repressive Stamp Act being imposed on the colonies in 1765 by a British parliament in “one of the dumbest political acts in history,” says historian Carol Berkin. It ends six hours later with a 1783 peace that in some ways is more challenging for the new nation than the preceding war, as the infant U.S. initially gets tangled in its own umbilical cord.

Among fascinating profiles here are those of future First Lady Abigail Adams, epic pamphleteer Tom Paine, Franklin (called “the war’s greatest salesman”) and, of course, George Washington, who will become the nation’s first president. Not your classic hero, his genius was not in the field--where he won only three of nine battles he led, says historian Richard Norton Smith--but “in keeping the cause alive.”

Saying a documentary on such a topic is entertaining may diminish and stigmatize it in some eyes, but highly entertaining it is. “Liberty!” is one of those rare collaborations that is first-rate on every scale. Sharing in the credit are the Brigade of the American Revolution--an amateur historical group whose reenactments here exceed that of any documentary within memory--the cast of relatively unfamous actors who recite from diaries, letters and memoirs, and the Ronald Blumer-written narration, read with perfection by Edward Herrmann.

As in the latter speaking of the pivotal surrender of a powerful British army at Saratoga in 1777, a stunning moment when the haughty Burgoyne’s defeated troops pass below their ragtag revolutionary conquerors--”row upon row of plainly dressed citizen soldiers, old men and young boys, free blacks, ordinary Americans”--silhouetted dramatically against a darkening sky. It’s the production’s epic chill up the spine.

And you needn’t be a flag-waving superfan to feel it when Herrmann adds about a British officer writing “that he felt as if he were looking at a new race of men.”

A “new race of men,” it turned out, whose concept of liberty was hardly all-inclusive, a point made emphatically by this admirable documentary whose own existence reminds us that all television is not created equal.

*

* “Liberty! The American Revolution” airs Sunday, Monday and Tuesday at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28. The station will repeat the miniseries in its entirety on Nov. 30, beginning at 3 p.m.