The film doesn't duck Twain's dark side. It acknowledges that he had a violent temper (a neighbor was shocked when he threw dozens of shirts out the upstairs window because one was missing a button) and, more troublingly, hints that he wished his beloved daughters would remain children forever. (A photo of him at his daughter Clara's wedding is frightening: dressed to upstage the bride in his honorary Oxford gown, he looks as grim as death.) The man who would for hours tell his three little girls stories based (in prescribed order) on certain items in the library was also the man who vanished for months at a time, who could be distant and cold, who demanded adulation. To their credit, the filmmakers allow these contradictory elements to stand, without trying to explain them.

The only serious criticism of "Mark Twain" concerns the arc of its story, which emphasizes Twain's ultimately tragic later life at the expense of a deeper exploration of his most important and dynamic creative and personal period. Episode 1 ends in 1885 with the U.S. publication of his masterpiece, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," when Twain was almost 50 years old and had written virtually all of his major work -- "Innocents Abroad," "Roughing It," "Life on the Mississippi," "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn." All of Episode 2, therefore, takes place when Twain's creative career was in decline -- a slow decline, one punctuated by highlights such as "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and the bitter, fantastic outbursts of his God-detesting old age, but decline nevertheless.

The second part deals with a sadder man than the lovable picaro who muscled his way on pure, irrepressible talent to the top of America's literary heap. We see Twain's obsession with becoming even richer than he was, his abysmal business sense (Arthur Miller has some perspicacious comments on why artists are too imaginative to ever be good businessmen) and, above all, the heartrending deaths of his beloved daughter Susy and wife, Livy. We also witness one of the great stories in American literary history, the grueling around-the-world lecture tour that the 60-year-old Twain undertook to pay off his enormous debts -- a tour that ended four years later with the 64-year-old writer returning home to a hero's welcome, acclaimed as "the bravest writer in America." But mostly, we witness a man whose lights, as the novelist Russell Banks puts it, have been going out as he got older. (Banks notes memorably that in his early days, when he shed light in all directions, Twain was a "wise guy who's wise.")

In short, it's a long downer, and maybe longer than it needed to be. On the other hand, it's true. Burns and his collaborators' approach implicitly asserts that a writer's personal life is just as worthy of interest as his work. It's a perfectly reasonable position -- and certainly Twain's entire life was remarkable. And from a practical point of view, the "tragic fall" of Twain's later life makes it a good story -- where else were they going to break Part 1 to keep viewers coming back for Part 2?

Still, I can't help but wish that Twain's creative decline had been condensed and that some of Episode 2 had been devoted to taking deeper looks at books like "Life on the Mississippi," "Innocents Abroad" and "Roughing It" -- all masterpieces in their own right that don't quite get their due here. A discussion of "Life on the Mississippi" could have provided an opportunity to examine both the muscular rightness of Twain's descriptive prose and his irritating tendency to pad great books with inferior material. (Every Burns film is always going to be just a tiny bit sentimental: Just as Twain's racial attitudes are slightly elevated, nothing is said here about how Twain, even at his best, had a wee admixture of the hack in him. Hence the lame ending of "Huckleberry Finn." Actually, it's an endearing trait. Would we want "the Lincoln of our literature" to be an ice machine like Flaubert?) "Innocents Abroad" is noteworthy for its created persona, the smartass rube who allows Twain to crack wise without missing a beat. And "Roughing It" remains quite simply one of the weirdest and wildest books ever written, a ridiculous "true" romp of a memoir whose tour de force balancing of fact and fiction, real self and bogus "reality" anticipates gonzo journalism. Both of those books could have grabbed more of the spotlight.

Instead, we are told more about Twain's harebrained business schemes than we need to know. Visually too, the film falls off in the second part: There are endless shots of Twain's Hartford mansion, inside, outside, in fall, in summer. Mostly, though, we watch the unutterably sad story of the tragedies that befell Twain in his later life, and his anguished and, frankly, rather bizarre literary reaction. "Mark Twain" never quite explains just why the death of his wife and his daughter destroyed Twain's belief in a benevolent God and led him to write the weird, hopeless, clunkily metaphysical tales of his late career -- but I'm not sure that any other biography has, either.

He went down to silent sadness in the end, even his Lear-like rages falling from him. But that isn't what one remembers, or should remember. One should remember Twain the irrepressible, the life force, braggard and trickster and bully-ram blowhard and great poet of our tongue, bouncing off fate's ropes like Muhammad Ali, again and again.

"Mark Twain" does justice to this great, flawed, deeply lovable writer and great, flawed, deeply lovable man. And it leaves the viewer just a little bit prouder of, and more filled with wonder about, the strange country, maybe still young, that could produce a man who did so much, and lived so long.

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