Horatio's Drive

In a brief featurette on the making of Horatio's Drive on the DVD, filmmaker Ken Burns confesses that he was reluctant to film writer-collaborator (Lewis & Clark) Dayton Duncan's story about Horatio Nelson Jackson's history-making first-ever cross-country road trip in 1903, until Duncan found Jackson's granddaughters, who had unearthed letters written from Horatio to his wife (nicknamed "Swipes") over the course of the months-long excursion. In a rare misstep, Burns decided to make Horatio's Drive, a half-hour tale (at best) padded out to nearly two repetitive hours chronicling the initially interesting story of an optimist who bets $50 on a whim that he can drive his 1901 cherry red Winton touring car (which he called "the Vermont" in honor of his home state) from San Francisco to New York in 90 days or less. The primary interviewee here is Duncan, which makes for a kind of weird, insular viewpoint (William Least Heat-Moon and a few others chime in with very general observations--but it's obvious they don't know diddly about Jackson, and frankly, that's not surprising). Add to that the mechanical breakdowns every five miles--each one meticulously recounted in detail that only a rabid fan of Car and Driver could appreciate--and Tom Hanks' Forrest Gump-like reading of Jackson's singularly optimistic (and singularly bland) letters, and before long you find yourself fairly whimpering, "are we there yet?" To be fair, the pace picks up a bit when not one, but two other car-company-backed contestants enter the unofficial race, but even so, Horatio's Drive (with its overused "Horatio" cam--contemporary footage aged and sepia-toned for an authentic look) spends far too much time on a subject that simply doesn't warrant the lavish treatment, while offering disappointingly little insight into the early 20th century social, cultural, and political milieu in which the road trip took place. In addition to the aforementioned "making of" featurette, the DVD also includes deleted scenes. Optional. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)