The new three-part PBS documentary “Henry David Thoreau” enlists a mighty roster of historians, literary scholars, environmentalists, and other experts to explain why its sage subject remains more relevant than ever in our go-go, profit-driven world. It features sublime nature cinematography to reflect the man best known for living a little over two years in the woodland near Concord’s Walden Pond, an experience that yielded Thoreau’s enduring manual of self-reliance, “Walden.”
Airing at 9 p.m. Monday (parts 1 and 2) and Tuesday (part 3) on PBS and pbs.org, it’s a handsomely mounted, passionate, and convincing piece of filmmaking. It also helped me readjust my own thinking on Thoreau, about whom I hold views more ambivalent than the rhapsodies on display here.
The timing of the film is serendipitous for me: I just finished my own deep dive into Thoreau as part of a 19th-century American literature course. While this hardly makes me an expert, it does mean my responses come fresh from the pond. Chief among those responses: Though I greatly admire Thoreau’s influence as an environmentalist, an abolitionist, an activist, and a man of conscience, I find him to be a bit of a moralizing scold.
“Undoubtedly,” he writes in “Walking” (among my favorite of his essays), “all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level.” Arf. Baaa. “I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in the world by the help of men,” he writes in “Walden.” Reading this, I actually felt a tinge of sadness. It must have been lonely to be Thoreau, in the woods or in the city or anywhere else.
It should be noted that I’m hardly the only one who doesn’t worship at the altar of Thoreau and transcendentalism. In a riotous 2017 Boston Globe column headlined “Happy birthday, Henry Thoreau, you gassy old crank,” Alex Beam wrote: “The oft-inflicted ‘Walden’ loses a bit of its man-living-in-nature edge when you know that he was eating at home twice a week, according to New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz, ‘lured by his mother’s cookies or the chance to dine with friends.’” For her part, Schulz called “Walden” “an unnavigable thicket of contradiction and caprice.”
“Henry David Thoreau,” of course, is much kinder than that, even as it gets into some of Thoreau’s contradictions (including the fact that this proto tree-hugger accidentally burned down 300 acres of Concord woodland in 1844, earning him the scorn of neighbors who labeled him “woods burner”). The doc bears the pedigree of producer Ken Burns (along with Don Henley, who is founder of the Walden Woods Project). Jeff Goldblum brings characteristic quirk to the voice of Thoreau. Ted Danson voices Thoreau’s mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Meryl Streep voices every female character, because she’s Meryl Streep. The whole thing is very polished and professional.
And it left me with a deeper appreciation of its subject. I can roll my eyes at Thoreau’s sense of superiority, or cringe a little at his clunky writing — Beam called him “a graphomanic overwriter of densely forested, unreadable prose” — and still recognize that we could use more like him right now. Someone to tell us to slow down, and feel free to criticize and even disobey a government that we don’t support (the gist of “Civil Disobedience”), to quit being so intent on getting likes. Perhaps we could all benefit from some time in the woods. With cookies, of course.
Chris Vognar can be reached at chris.vognar@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram at @chrisvognar and on Bluesky at chrisvognar.bsky.social.