Ken Burns’ monumental “Civil War” first aired all the way back in 1990. Director Wendy Jo Cohen has the Burns look nailed: waterlogged photos; plaintive violin; talking heads with varying agendas, qualifications and accents; and slow pans across letters with bad handwriting.
Cohen’s film, though, is a so-called mockumentary. The never-happened “The Battle of Pussy Willow Creek” involves a Union group led by an opium-addicted gay lieutenant, a scientifically inclined ex-slave, an elderly Chinese man unsure of whether his destiny is to do laundry or lead men into battle and a one-armed hooker.
The tale is spun by an equally motley assortment of on-camera “experts,” including distant relatives, a working prostitute/historian and a one-eyed military maven who gets his blood pressure checked on camera.
None of this, unfortunately, is all that funny, although there’s daffy charm to some moments. The Ken Burns technique of using ghostly sound effects while showing the present-day battlefield here morphs into a hand-held camera charging purposefully around a strip-mall parking lot.
Most of the humor, though, is wan, exemplified by letters like “Dear General Lee: Sounds great! Please proceed with your plan.”
Overall, it’s hard to say what’s being sent up. The admittedly far more lavish “Django Unchained” used well-worn conventions, those of the spaghetti Western, to satirize the sanitized view of the Old South with things like that anachronistic Klan ride. Cohen’s movie shows a much deeper knowledge of the period, but even the gentlest satires need a target.