John Adams (2008)
| Overall |  | Story |  |
| Production | | Acting | |
I’ve finally finished the DVD set for HBO’s John Adams miniseries, dramatized from David McCullough’s award-winning biography of the Founder.
Brilliant.
The story manages to cover a huge swath of Adams’ career, starting with his defense of the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre, through the Continental Congress, his appointment to the French court, and later the court of St James in Britain, his frustrating service as Vice-President, then President, then his long retired days with family, tragedy, and memoirs.
I’ve been a fan of Adams since being first introduced to him in the musical 1776. The production here does a spectacular job of conveying both the man, his colleagues, and his times. Paul Giamatti’s fantastic as Adams: vain, insecure, brilliant, querulous, principled, stubborn, independent, puritanical, earthy, vindictive, determined, dutiful, “obnoxious and disliked,” bitter, patriotic. As with the rest, a Founder with feet of clay.
The rest of the cast are nearly as good. Laura Linney’s Abigail is an excellent foil, both softer and more fierce, long-suffering and deeply loved. David Morse makes an marvelous Washington, tall and taciturn. And Stephen Dillane’s Jefferson is quiet, plotting, philosophical, sad, dangerously idealistic.
And the rest of the players, as they come and go, colleagues and children and the rest, are well sketched and well-played. It’s truly a dramatization, with details altered for impact, and quotations moved around to different eras. But it is still true without being the precise (for the latter, I recommend the actual book).
One thing that gives the mini-series such verisimilitude is the production itself. The setpieces are well-done, both Colonial America, and the courts of Europe. But better yet are the costumes and make-up. These are not clean, well-coiffed actors in a period piece. These are folks with frizzled (and receding) hair, skin pocked and blemished, mottled, age-spotted and wrinkled. Their teeth, over the course of the series, progressively and visibly decay. Clothing is rough-spun, or wrinkled. Even in the high society of France, the powder and make-up (as with the culture) clearly just covers the dirt and stink. That all sounds gruesome, perhaps, but it makes the characters all the more human and approachable, and the history that much more alive.
If there is anything to criticize is that so much is left out. The story seems to take substantial jumps, especially later in life, between the most noteworthy events. That interrupts the narrative at times, especially in such a personal account, but such is the danger of actual biography — even Adams could not be involved in the highest drama his entire life.
I’d highly recommend this for anyone with an interest in the Revolutionary period, in the politics and philosophies of our Founders, as well as anyone with an interest in the people behind historical events. If more history were like this — more people would be more interested in history.