'The American Buffalo' review: Ken Burns' film is brilliantly told, but hard to watch

 WHAT IT'S ABOUT This four-hour Ken Burns film begins on the Great Plains of the early 19th century, where the Kiowa, Comanche and Cheyenne (Southern Plains),  Pawnee (Central), and Lakota, Aaniiih, Crow and Blackfeet (Northern), among many others, had long depended on the revered buffalo for food and shelter. Then, with westward expansion, the slaughter began, and by the end of 19th century, extinction loomed. Tuesday's episode highlights efforts to save the buffalo by many, including Quanah Parker, a Comanche leader, "Buffalo Bill" Cody, Theodore Roosevelt, and a Long Island robber baron, Austin Corbin, who built an "exotic game preserve" in New Hampshire filled with buffalo. The film includes extensive commentary by  American Indian scholars and writers, including N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Ron Parker (Comanche), George Horse Capture, Jr. (Aaniiih), and Rosalyn LaPier (Blackfeet of Montana and Métis).

MY SAY Whether baseball or jazz, the Civil War or Vietnam, Ken Burns films are really about the American character. Sometimes the subject is the character, both interchangeable, one begetting the other. After a while we start to see something of ourselves in his films because that's what we're supposed to see. 

  But if the subject is the American buffalo, what are we to make of ourselves then?  

 The buffalo's near-eradication also decimated the native peoples that had relied upon them for 10,000 years. The slaughter was so wanton that the plains were littered with enough bones to feed a vast industry that ground them up for fertilizer. By the 1880s, there were only a few hundred buffalo left from dozens of millions — casualties of greed, progress, Manifest Destiny, railroads, disease, broken treaties and a federal government that sought their extirpation as part of Indian "pacification" policies.

  If you've already guessed that "The American Buffalo'' is a cautionary story filtered through a searing national character study, then you've obviously guessed correctly. Nevertheless, unusual for any Burns film, there's a darkness that pervades these four hours, even when they drift to the more or less enlightened 20th century, when conservationists and others stepped forward. Maybe that darkness is just a reflection of our own environmental desecrations. Or maybe it's the long, hard look at that character. But it is difficult to find anything here that offers much solace, for either ourselves or the buffalo, most  now confined to feedlots before ending up on a plate at Ted's Montana Grill. 

 Another possible reason for the pervasive gloom is that the story of the buffalo is a back door to one that Burns has never really told before — the American Indian. Maybe that story is too complex, or painful, even for him. "The Civil War" (1990) was a backdoor into the history of slavery too, but at least the outcome was the Emancipation Proclamation. Instead, the story here feels unfinished (or the crime still in progress?).

  Then, there's that ever-fraught American character. In "Buffalo '' it's a kind of dialectic, where excess is followed by caution, waste by conservation. The extremes of this character, its yin and yang, eventually end up in the reasonable middle. That's the silver lining, or optimistic glow, that comes with any Burns film and which does eventually arrive here.

  But the inescapable subtext of this one are modern-day environmental crises, notably climate change. As commentator  George Horse Capture Jr., wonders, "Do you have to destroy the things you love?" "The American Buffalo" then pretty much leaves us with one final question: Well, do we? 

BOTTOM LINE Hard to watch, brilliantly told.