I'm not much for miniseries. It's gotta be REALLY promising to get me to commit multiple hours of my time to the boob tube. But "John Adams," HBO's undertaking of David McCullough's lauded novel, had so much buzz on it I was compelled to watch.
I am SO glad I did.
The miniseries opens just prior to the beginning of the Revolutionary War and ends with Adams' death. If you like your history with a dab of realistic gore, HBO has you covered – beginning with an actual tar and feathering at the Port of Boston, all the way through to a 1700s style mastectomy on Adams' adult daughter. Along the way, you're witness to icky, icky smallpox innoculations and amputations aboard overseas journeys. It's not for the squeamish. Which I kinda like – because our nation's history has its nastier points and I don't like it when they're left out. A sanitized version of anything really is just about half-true, isn't it?
Director Tom Hooper succeeds in portraying the era in its most honest light, and brings out the very best in his cast, with stellar perfrormances from Paul Giamatti as John Adams, Laura Linney as Abagail, Tom Wilkinson as Ben Franklin, David Morse as George Washington, and Stephen Dillane as Thomas Jefferson. I actually felt the awards season was rather unfortunate to Dillane – his performance as a sometimes tortured, often conflicted Jefferson was magnificent. Ah, well - everyone shone.
I'm impressed with how much ground the miniseries covered – although it did take liberty with the book, so one should be careful not to take the movie as gospel. Adams and Jefferson's passionate work on the Declaration of Independence, their subsequent lifelong friendship and feuding, Adams' indignation with some of the boobs in Congress and its impact on his presidency, his emotional pain at witnessing one son destroy himself while another follows in his footsteps, and of course, his close, close relationship with Abagail. That woman would give Hillary Clinton a run for her money.
If you can't catch it On Demand through cable, you can find it on DVD – check it out!
