That's Not What She Said: John Adams, Episode One, or: A-Hunting We Will Go

The United States is a nation of laws, not of men. -- John Adams

Or somesuch. I’m having a hard time finding an actual source for that little tidbit, perhaps the most misunderstood (and definitely the most oft-quoted) bon mot from a man who was nothing if not a master of the short, cutting remark. To take it on its face, it seems like the sort of thing to which one must react with shock: what kind of nation would it be if it did not acknowledge the existence of the humans who comprise it it? My god, the damage such a state could perpetrate.

Adams meant it in fundamentally a different way, however. What the revolutionary Americans rebelled against was in fact a nation very much of men -- the key distinction was that it was a nation of a very few men, which ruled over a great many. The law, as such, must have seemed nebulous to a man who lived thousands of miles from the halls of power. The law could change at the caprice of men -- of one very specific man, the King of England. Adams envisioned a country in which the law, very nearly immutable, ignored the petty desires of any individual and treated all the same. The blind mistress justice and all that.

Whether that turned out to be what we got, and if so, whether that’s a good thing, is a debate for another forum. But I’ve just recently watched the first episode of HBO’s John Adams, based on David McCullough’s fascinating (if somewhat fawning) biography, and it’s set me to thinking. The difficulty with a history of the United States is that it must be, by its very nature, the history of a system. But stories want to be about people. And therein lies the problem.

In Which We Recount What Happened

I suppose it would be a mistake to start a miniseries called John Adams with anything other than John Adams. And television, let’s be clear, is not history. So perhaps the creators of John Adams the show can be excused for shoehorning John Adams the man into a situation in which, as far as we know, he took no part: Adams comes riding into Boston on a frigid night in 1770, and no sooner than he has greeted his wife than the call goes up that there is a fire, and he barrels out into the cold and dark to help. As he pounds toward the source of the disturbance, it becomes clear that something altogether different is happening: gunshots, and then a wave of fleeing people rushing up an alleyway. Seconds later, Adams wades knee-deep into the aftermath of the famous Boston Massacre: bloodied British troops stand surrounded by dead New Englanders, and no less a personage than Adams’ cousin Sam (also not there, and noted mostly today as progenitor of a famous if not particularly awesome beer) shouting that they are murderers. Suffice it to say that neither man was likely present for this event, but hey, it’s television, and the Massacre qua a court case did turn out to be pivotal in the life of John Adams, so what the heck, why not.

When Adams, saying, “Counsel is the last person a person should lack in a free country” (but not missing out on the fact that the case will raise his profile), agrees to defend the soldiers, the first episode of John Adams becomes a courtroom drama. These scenes, to say the least, drag a little bit. Though the court, in certain ways, does not resemble any court you’re likely to see on Law & Boredom or Boston Legal, in other ways viewers of those shows will feel right at home. Witnesses quite literally stand at a bar behind the lawyers, as do the defendants, surrounded by a rabble. The lawyers wear comical white wigs and gowns that look not unlike what you might have worn to your college graduation. But the structure of the scenes: the truthful witness, the lying witness, the unlikely witness who sucks it up to tell the truth despite the external pressures not to do so, the final closing flourish in which the good guy out-shines his opponent with rousing oratory . . . you’ll be wondering where Sam Waterson is.

More effective are interstitial scenes that punctuate this action, in which Adams discusses his career prospects with Jonathan Sewall, a powerful friend but a Tory, and the case with his wife, Abigail, whose chief function seems to be to act as a drag on his ego. When he wants to quote every great thinker from history in his closing statement, his wife reminds him that convincing people that he is smart and convincing people that his clients are not guilty are not the same thing.

After his victory in court guts his practice, Adams is presented with a choice: Sewall has offered him a job working, essentially, for the king’s government. His cousin Sam wants him involved in politics -- first local Massachusetts politics, and then, later, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia; Sam Adams believes that John Adams’ presence will lend his ticket gravitas: a man who would defend British soldiers but also oppose British rule must be a fair and bright man indeed, goes the reasoning.

Adams’ inner turmoil is played out before his eyes: standing at Boston Harbor, he watches as an incensed mob tars and feathers a British ship’s captain who would unload taxable tea. (Let me tell you something: I had always thought about tarring and feathering as a kind of humorous thing. Well, it appears it was not at all. I hadn’t really thought through the consequences of hot tar on naked flesh, but it appears that it was quite disgusting.) Discussing this scene with his wife, Adams says, “The people are in need of strong government, Abigail. Restraint. Most men are weak, and evil, and vicious.” While I agree with the latter part, it is unclear, at this point, what Adams means by the former.

His decision is essentially made for him when British troops roll into Boston en masse and the King declares, essentially, that the rule of law cannot be enforced in Massachusetts, and that disturbers of the peace will be taken to England for “fair” trial. That seems to be the last straw for Adams, the great believer in law (and, lest we not forget, his own abilities in that field), and, in the final moments of the episode, he packs himself onto a horse to ride with the Massachusetts delegation to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

The Good

Though deeply flawed, the first episode of John Adams does bring ample pleasures. Chief among these is the performance of Paul Giamatti, who has turned out to be one of the very best American actors in the business. His Adams is at times like a bear disturbed from hibernation: hunched, growly, powerful. Other times . . . . well, he’s always a little growly, but in the wake of a big legal victory or caught up in the pleasure of his work, he is energetic and comical, vain and self-conscious but also charismatic. Giamatti lacks the cannon-like voice so often associated with long-dead founding fathers, but his gruff (not to say grim) honks lend Adams reality that he might night have had in the hands of a trombone-voiced Shakespearean.

Flowing from Giamatti’s performance, the characterization of Adams himself is more complicated than one might expect. His flaws are not glossed: Adams is self-regarding and short-tempered, blatantly favors his older children at the expense of his middle son, Charles, and if principled certainly seems not to object when those principles align very closely with his ambition. He is independent, opinionated, stubborn to a fault -- American. The real John Adams was descended from many generations of Americans, and was not in any sense an expatriated Briton; John Adams seems to grasp that intrinsically.

The cinematography, art direction, costumes and set direction are all very fine as well, and communicate in a way that almost nothing I’ve seen before has the reality of life in the late 18th Century. In many period pieces, everyone comes off as perhaps a little too coiffed, every hair in place, as if the fact that they wore wigs and spoke an unfamiliar dialect means that life had no dirt on it. Not so here. Director Tom Hooper employs handheld cameras and tight close-ups, communicating to the viewer that life in Massachusetts in 1770 was neither easy nor clean.

Though this technique is common in cop shows and war movies, I’ve never seen it employed in a period piece, and it’s very effective. No expense has been spared in the attempt to make 1770 feel real to us. The camera work does not violate that.

The Bad

A niggling aside, but let’s get it out of the way first: The accents are . . . well, it’s hard to figure them out. I’m not sure that anybody has any real grasp of what an American might have sounded like 240 years ago. Would a colony still under British control have had something closer to what one might today call a British accent? Would Adams, a small-town Massachusetts man by birth, have sounded like a character out of a Stephen King novel, a backwoods New England hick? As an educated man, would he have spoken with that flat Kennedyesque brogue? Danny Huston, as Sam Adams, seems to have shot for a tempered British affect. Giamatti and Linney seek to split the difference, with the result that they both seem to wobble a little bit, especially early on. After an adjustment period, however, Giamatti seems to hit on something consistent if not accurate, and it’s good that he does: Since Adams is a seminal American figure, it is necessary that he sound American. Though Giamatti doesn’t sound exactly American, but he certainly doesn’t sound English.

Beyond that, the real problem is with the characterization of everyone other than Adams. Because he is the hero, the show has an obvious investment in making Adams seem principled and strong, as no doubt he was. Unfortunately, it suffers from a variation on what I like to call Teen Moron Syndrome.

A movie that suffers from Teen Moron Syndrome has a main character who is bright, teenaged, and frequently socially outcast. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t trust the audience to notice that our hero is smart, so all of the teenagers around him must be slavering idiots by contrast. (For a classic example, see the otherwise excellent War Games.)

John Adams does not make Adams’ contemporaries stupid, it makes them morally reprehensible. In an attempt to make John Adams seem like a voice of reason, it portrays Samuel Adams as a rabel-rousing, cutthroat ruffian, whose eye very nearly glints at the sight of a riotous crowd covering the nude body of an innocent man in hot tar. It makes Sewall a clueless stuffed shirt, and his wife a tittering simpleton. Bloodthirsty masses abound. Witnesses at the trial of the soldiers are little but bewigged savages. After a while, this becomes tiresome.

The Ugly

I have the feeling that John Adams is going to provide us with a lot of ugliness before all is said and done, but the ugliest thing about the first episode has to be the image of a tarred-and-feathered man being ridden out of town on a rail.