John Adams

Note: This review only covers parts 1 and 2, for reasons explained below.

Remember the way the Joker’s lair looked in the old Batman TV show from the 1960s?  It was always tilted at an angle, as if the level on the camera were somehow broken.  Someone forgot to check the level on the camera that filmed this John Adams series.  The debates at Independence Hall look like the Joker’s lair, angled for no apparent reason, so that you can almost see the Penguin and the Riddler sitting with the Virginia state delegates, cackling wildly while they and George Washington plot to take over Gotham.

That’s not the only directorial problem in a series that suffers from weird shot after weird shot.  There are scenes where there’s an unfocused object in the extreme foreground, for no apparent reason.  There are even plenty of shaky, handheld-type camera movements for those who think eighteenth-century parliamentary procedure needs to look like The Bourne Supremacy.

Maybe the reason for this is to spice up the subject matter, namely John Adams, which is pretty dull at times.  Even Adams tells everyone how bored he is at the meetings of the Continental Congress.  They’d introduce a motion that two plus three equals five, he says, and then debate it for two days before motioning to approve it.  But then, in Episode 2, we see meeting after meeting of the kind of debate and discussion that Adams says he’s weary of.  It’s the cinematic equivalent of watching some Congressional committee go at it on C-SPAN, which no one these days has the patience to watch for two minutes.

So yes, John Adams suffers from being dull.  It’s not as if Adams himself was boring — take a look at his resume sometime — but the way he’s portrayed here should make any viewer wonder why we are watching a series about him.  Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson all come across as much more intriguing characters than Adams here.  The drama of the early Revolutionary War is barely seen, but when it is we are much more interested in it.  Even the Adams’ family’s daily life — Abigail Adams’ floor-scrubbing techniques, the family’s bout with smallpox — are more interesting than Adams’ many speeches about liberty.  At least HBO has created something that will make a better substitute in public high school history classrooms for the next two decades.

Episode 1, “Join or Die,” begins with the Boston Massacre.  Adams famously defended the British soldiers accused of murdering a bunch of Bostonians, so the episode is dedicated mostly to the trial, which comes off as just another episode of Law and Order except that the lawyers wear wigs and use big, Latinate words like “desanguination.”  The main point of this episode is to show that the American colonists were rabble-rousers who tended to use mob tactics.  They form a mob that leads to the Boston massacre, they scream for British blood throughout the trial, and then they tar and feather a British ship captain afterwards.   Above it all is Adams, who looks on the tar-and-feathering scene with disgust and says that most men are weak and need “strong government.”  It isn’t more than a few minutes later, however, that Adams is denouncing British tyranny in a church after just being elected to represent Massachusetts at a meeting of the Continental Congress.  All men have their contradictions, but this Adams doesn’t know what kind of story he is in, or else he’d be screaming for a more coherent representation of himself and his fellow colonists.

Episode 2, “Independence,” is the C-SPAN-like episode we mentioned above.  There are interesting moments, however.  Maybe the best is when Franklin and Adams are reading Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence.  Franklin, who is portrayed excellently in this series as a shifty character prone to ironic humor, starts to edit the document.  Jefferson complains that every word was precisely chosen, but Franklin insists that “sacred and undeniable” is pulpit language, and that “we hold these truths to be self-evident” is a much more palatable and pragmatic choice.  You get the feeling throughout these two episodes that church doctrine mattered less to these guys —  it is totally absent, after all — than eighteenth-century philosophical abstractions.

Scenes like this demonstrate that the series should’ve been reconceived as Founding Fathers or From Colony to Nation or something broader like that.  The mix of personalities we’ve known since grade school, portrayed here with a good degree of accuracy, is quite dynamic at times, so that focusing on Adams seems merely opportunistic, coming on the heels of David McCullough’s best-selling, pop biography of Adams as it does.  We couldn’t make it to Episode 3.  Adams’ was a life of debate, negotiation, and politics, and so it seems likely that the rest of the series will have the same problems as the first parts of it.  Let us know if this isn’t true.

FYI: There’s a brief shot of unexpected full-frontal nudity when the British captain is being tarred and feathered in Episode 1.  The series is rated “TV-14,” probably just for that.