Obnoxious and disliked

Haven't been able to watch any of HBO's John Adams, and it's killing me.  But based on what I've been reading about it, I have a feeling it would do worse than kill me if I did watch it.  It would bore me.

And then make me mad at it for being boring about John Adams, my favorite revolutionary.

According to all reports, Tom Wilkinson is terrific as Ben Franklin, but Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney aren't quite as good as John and Abigail Adams as I expected them to be.  I like David Morse but, although he's certainly tall enough and solid enough for the part, he strikes me as miscast as Washington.  And so far, it appears, Stephan Dillane, hasn't had much to do as Thomas Jefferson.  Will be interesting to hear (and eventually see, when it comes out on DVD) how the producers handle Adams and Jefferson's friendship, rivalry, falling out, and reconciliation, since it was mostly carried out by correspondence.  Abigail had a friendship by letter with Jefferson too.

Over at newcritics, Tom Watson's posted his review of the series so far and two thoughts nagged at me while I was reading it.

One is that the show's approach to Adams' life sounds all wrong.  Adams' story makes for great drama.  It was mainly a series of great theatrical set pieces---the courtship of Abigail, the Boston Massacre Trial, the debate over Independence, the crises and failure of his Presidency---separated by long periods of domestic tranquility and with a comedic interlude, his pairing with Franklin on the diplomatic mission to France.  The series seems to be presenting his life as being all of a piece, one long continuous tale, so that the periods of tranquility---the stuff of histories of daily life in 18th Century America---get almost the same attention as the moments of high drama.  On top of that, it appears that the producers haven't understood what kind of drama Adams' life was.

A comedy.

In the Shakespearean sense---it's a story that is as happy and ends as happily as any human life's story can.  And the self-described obnoxious and disliked Adams was a comic hero.  Washington was an epic hero, Jefferson an ironic one, bordering on tragic.  But like Franklin, Adams belongs in a comedy.  He was funny in his person, funny as a character.  Franklin was funny as a character too, but it was deliberate, and part of the comedy of his life is the slyness of his invention of himself as a character.  Adams couldn't help being something of a joke even while he was heroically putting the young Republic on its feet.  That's not what makes him a comic hero though.

His story's comedic because life worked out reasonably well for him in the end.  But he's a comic hero because he never gave in to his own tendency to see life as a pretty miserable joke played on all of us by the Almighty.  Adams' whole life was his living out of a 91 years' long argument with himself, the vain but practical and determined and essentially humorous Adams against the obnoxious, irritable, pessimistic, misanthropic, self-loathing Adams.  And while the second Adams seemed to be always getting the better of the argument, at least on paper in the diaries and letters, it was the first Adams who kept winning out in the end, just by being also the stubborn side of himself, the one that refused to quit.

Franklin and Adams are often portrayed as they seemed to think of each other, as opposites, the cheerfully hedonistic Franklin contending against the irritably Puritanical Adams.  But they were alike in this way underneath.  Both understood the essentially tragic nature of our lives, and both set themselves up to live in defiance of that tragedy.  If tragedy is the overwhelming of life by Chaos, then Franklin and Adams were Chaos' enemies and in their struggle did in fact defeat it by bringing order not just to their own lives but to the lives of all Americans for generations to come.

When asked after the Constitutional Convention what kind of government he and his fellow writers of the Constitution had given us, Franklin famously replied, A republic, if you can keep it.

He might just as well have said, a bulwark against Chaos, if you can keep it up.

From what I've read about the HBO series, I don't think the producers have grasped the comedic element at all. 

One of Tom Watson's criticisms of the series is that "too often, this Adams looks like a second-tier player, a utility infielder among revolutionaries like Washington, Franklin, and even Jefferson."

If this is the case, and it isn't just the result of a flaw in Giamatti's performance, then the writers and director either don't understand the nature of collaboration, which, given their professions, seems unlikely, or they have goofed.

Sounds like they're trying to portray Adams as an epic hero, like Washington, and on those terms Adams is bound to come across as having been built on too small a scale.  Besides this being off the mark, the thing about epic heroes is that they tend not to just stand out in the crowd, but stand apart from them.  Epic heroes are lonely figures.  Adams may have thought of himself as obnoxious and disliked and often felt lonely and isolated but in fact he was one of the most gregarious and social of men.  He did nothing alone.  That's why his marriage and his family are so much a part of his biography.  That's another thing he had in common with Franklin.  That's another reason his life was a comedy.  Tragedies are the stories of individuals coming apart.  A comedy is the story of a society coming together and that's the story of John Adams' life.

My second thought after reading Tom's review was that, while I'd like to be watching this series out of curiosity, I'd much rather watch again The Adams Chronicles, the 1976 PBS mini-series, starring George Grizzard as John Adams.  I suspect Grizzard defined Adams in my imagination more than even William Daniels in 1776.  (Daniels, by the way, played John Quincy Adams in that series.)  But on top of that I think the series captured the comedic aspect of Adams' life and character.

Of course I may think that because the scene I remember best after all these years is the one where Adams and Franklin, forced at inn to share not just the same room but the same bed, fight over whether or not to leave a window open while they're sleeping.  Adams, who wasn't feeling well and was worried he'd catch cold, wanted it closed.  Franklin argued that keeping it open would be the healthier choice.

I don't remember how the argument concluded in the mini-seires.  In real life in ended with Adams being persuaded to leave the window open in order by Franklin's promising to explain his theory of colds.

Adams wrote:

Opening the window and leaping into bed, I said I had read his letters to Dr Cooper in which he had advanced that nobody ever got a cold by going into a cold church, or any other cold air.  But the theory was so little consistent with my experience that I thought it a paradox.  However I had so much curiosity to hear his reasons that  I would run the risque of a cold.

The Doctor then began an haragnue, upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his philosophy together.  But I believe they were equally sound and insensible, within a few minutes after me, for the last words I heard were pronounced as if he was more than half asleep.

What did I tell you?  Comic heroes, both of them.

The Massachusetts Historical Society has a great, searchable site devoted to Adams' papers, letters, and autobiography but I got the quote above from H.W. Brands' very enjoyable biography of Franklin, The First American.

And David McCollough re-tells the story in his biography of Adams, the book the HBO series is based on.

The Adams Chronicles is available on DVD, but I'll have to wait until June to watch John Adams.

Comments

[minstrel hussain boy]

i too am a huge adams fan. your assesment of his place and role is spot on. i tell folks that adams was the most essential of the founders. washington the most heroic, jefferson the most lyrical, hamilton the most dangerous etc. but adams, with all his self described faults was always there. always working. had the voices of war been allowed to blunder us into conflict with france or spain in those first few years i think adams premonition of us being crushed like a bug would have been seen through. we know of adams' frailties and faults because he told on himself, nearly compulsively so.

yes, by the framework of aristotle, adams was indeed a comedy. he did achieve his ends. although he would have enjoyed a bit more appreciation and understanding of his essential role.

[minstrel hussain boy]

so far, they've handled the jefferson/adams letter thing by staging it as conversations. they've done the same with abigail.

[tdraicer]

The only opinion I ever value when it comes to art or entertainment is my own. I think HBO's miniseries is wonderful and the two leads pretty near perfect. Anyone who disagrees with me is, of course, entitled to their mistaken pov.

[Tom W.]

That Massachusetts Historical Society archive is a treasure trove - reads like John Adams' blog.

[SV]

Not having HBO means that I've been watching PBS's Jane Austen-a-thon, instead, so I'm seeing everything through that viewpoint. I re-read your description of George Washington that you linked to - do you realize that you also described Mr. Darcy?

He was an aristocrat and that meant something to him; he expected deference to his rank and social station from people he regarded as his inferiors. And, when you got right down to it, he was better than most men around him, even those of his own rank, braver, stronger, more honest, harder-working. It must have been hard for him not to presume upon his reputation and use it as club to bully inferiors, and no doubt his self-regard could make him cold and arrogant when suffering fools or having to listen to advice and instructions from lesser men...

And now I've got a nasty image in my mind of Adams as a serious, ungainly, not-at-all-handsome, highly moral...Mr Collins! Which is totally unfair, considering what a humorless, sniveling toady Collins was, as opposed to the witty and fearless revolutionary Adams.

But I can totally see Thomas Jefferson as Wickham.

[chachabowl]

I like the series, however the weirdest moment was seeing Paul Giamatti as Adams, alone and sick in Amsterdam, sitting in a nightshirt without his wig on, and thinking, "Wow, he sure looks like Homer Simpson."

[John]

Morse is actually incredibly well cast as Washington, I think. Watching his performance, I feel like I have a much better sense of Washington than I did before. He also looks just like Washington.

Beyond that, I think you should watch the miniseries before making the criticism - I think there's something to what you're saying, but the miniseries at least gets parts of it right. There's definitely a number of places where Adams comes across as absurd and somewhat ridiculous. I'm not sure the problem is that the writers are trying to make Adams into an epic hero. I think the issue is more that the audience (or, at least, some of the audience) expects that Adams will come off as an epic hero, so that when he doesn't, these people are disappointed.

I do largely agree with your point about the structure being wrong - too much tranquility, not enough excitement. The episode about independence was very good, I thought, because it was all high drama throughout. But the last two episodes, in which Adams mostly sits around in Europe and is dissatisfied, didn't work as well, although they had good bits. I was disappointed, for instance, that the whole of the negociation of the Treaty of Paris was neglected. The fact that Adams basically screwed over the French by demanding separate negociations with the British would have been a nice revenge for his poor treatment in France in the previous episode.

Being a history grad student, and thus prone to nitpicking, I had a few problems with some parts of it - in particular, as a European historian, I thought the portrayal of Louis XVI was terrible. But in general I've basically enjoyed the series.

I also think Dillane is quite a good Jefferson. I'm looking forward to Rufus Sewell as Hamilton - the debates of the first decade of the constitution, more generally, ought to be the high point of the series, so I'm somewhat holding off on full judgment until I get a sense on how those are portrayed.

[Batocchio]

I'm really looking forward to seeing this when it's out on DVD. I've heard it's very good. Jefferson's always been my favorite, though.

[Dawn]

I have been watching and enjoying the HBO series, and not knowing much at all about Adams before I started, I would say that the series does capture your characterization of him as a comedic figure quite well, without crossing over the line into 'lovably funny curmudgeon'. I also get the idea that he was at heart a social person, since in the series he is so often lonely without his family, and when he feels cut off from his friends and not accepted by the societies of the countries he is in. As portrayed, he loves the give and take with his colleagues.

Of ocurse it is not going to show the totality of his life, but I think you might like it more than you expect.

[Regina H]

This post is right on the money, Lance--I watched all of it, & found myself more than a little disappointed. There were good things, yes, but on balance Kirk Ellis' script changed too much that didn't need to be changed, & Giamatti just didn't capture the wit, sparkle, & joy in living that redeemed Adams' faults and made him lovable.

What a waste!