There's a signature moment at the end of the first part of “John Adams,” the new miniseries adaptation of David McCullough's bestselling biography that began last Sunday.
The year is 1774 and Adams, played by Paul Giamatti, has just given his maiden speech as a new delegate to the Continental Congress, the one that was created in order to form a more perfect union -- or run King George's redcoats out of New England, take your pick.
Adams looked ill at ease up on the podium. He looked, actually, like he wanted to throw up. To be fair, however, there was rarely a moment in the first three hours of “John Adams” when its star didn't look like he was need of a bloodletting or similar therapy for some undisclosed internal ailment.
Paul Giamatti would not be on my short list, or I'm guessing most people's, to play our second president -- but then again, who would be? The fact is that unless you have read McCullough's book, you know very little about Adams, a New England farmer who would have been happy to stay that way except for his ambition and being caught in the slipstream of a colonial rebellion that would lead to the creation of these United States.
By this point in the film, we have seen Adams through four years of tortured deliberation over whether to support the Massachusetts rebels led by his second cousin, Sam Adams. He has had to break ranks with an old Tory friend and turn down a prized official post with the crown. Still, the future founder is still not entirely on board with the revolution.
Giamatti, who played the eternally ill-at-ease Harvey Pekar in “American Splendor” and the neurotic wine snob in “Sideways,” turns out to be a fine choice for the part of reluctant patriot. He certainly makes Adams seem like the last guy you'd expect to be starting a political dynasty. But duty and ambition call, and Adams has thrown in his lot with the patriots. And now, he's just given a hall full of rebels his best shot at rousing oratory. As the camera pans the room, you realize this is the same motley crowd that was likely at Boston Harbor in an earlier scene, tarring and feathering a British customs official who was unfortunate enough to be there at the dock with a shipment of tea.
The crowd belongs to Adams, however, and they huzzah him back to his seat, where his wife Abigail, played by Laura Linney, awaits him looking very pleased. John doesn't look pleased. He knows the British will not take kindly to New England's insurrection, and he knows what reckless violence the commoners are capable of. He leans over and whispers to his wife, “I fear we do not know what we do, Abigail!”
With a gleam in her eye, Abigail replies, “When men know what not to do, John, they ought not to do they-know-not-what.”
It's a clever line, probably better delivered than read, but John gets it immediately and so do we (especially if we have turned on the closed captioning on our TVs, the better to understand all of the many sotto voce moments in “John Adams”).
“John Adams” does what television history is supposed to do -- it strips the sepia tone off the portraits of epochal events and restores humanity to their actors. Forget about the fancy clothes and British-sounding accents. Here is a man surrendering uneasily to the march of time. In another age he could be a senator authorizing the use of military force in Iraq or Vietnam. He could be a president assuring a jittery public that they have nothing to fear but fear itself. He could be a minister telling a beaten-down movement to keep their eyes on the prize. The point is, there is nothing inexorable about history when you're in the middle of it.
And in Giamatti, classic Everyman performer, we instantly realize there is nothing inevitable about the rise of Adams. However, without the casting of Linney as Abigail, I suspect all that brooding would've been hard to take. Yes, Linney is easy on the eyes, but from the first time we catch a glimpse of her Abigail Adams, we realize that she was John's equal in every way: unfathomably strong and intelligent and passionate in that inner-directed way that people were in post-Puritan New England.
The Adams dynasty began as a partnership between two people who were co-equals in every way -- well, except under the law, as Abigail pointedly observes from time to time. McCullough has said that for much of the book's gestation, he seriously considered making it a dual biography of John and Abigail, and indeed this film appears to be as much about them as about him.
There are other unconventional casting decisions throughout “John Adams,” and they all seem to work. I'm still not quite on board with David Morse as George Washington, but again, that may be a good thing. I mean, if you want to humanize the American Cincinnatus, then give the role to the butcher of “Disturbia.” Tom Wilkinson, on the other hand, is pitch-perfect as Ben Franklin, the peculiar old card shark who takes Adams under his wing and shows him how the political game is played.
There are wonderful little stabs at authenticity throughout the film, like the hideous tar-and-feather scene, or when a doctor inoculates Abigail and her children from smallpox with pus from the boil of a sick patient. Steadicams are used abundantly to invest potentially tedious moments, such as courtroom scenes, with life-or-death urgency.
In one scene at the Continental Congress, Adams is about to launch into an impassioned argument when he suddenly stops as he realizes, in the hot meeting hall, that he has removed his parliamentary wig. Looking like Harvey Pekar stuck behind a slow shopper at the checkout, Adams rolls his eyes, plops the hairpiece back on his head, and starts over.
Also this week (all times Central):
TUESDAY
As big a deal as “John Adams” is, I predict that five years from now another HBO film debuting this month — “Autism: The Musical” (7 p.m., HBO) — is going to be playing in more homes and affecting more people’s lives.
With the number of children born with autism being reported at an alarming rate (1 in 150 by one widely used estimate), that’s a lot of households coping with this mysterious syndrome. Most of “Autism: The Musical” is not about music at all, but about five families involved in putting on the show.
THURSDAY
We’ll see how this plays on TV, but “Meet the Past,” the Kansas City Public Library’s attempt to merge “Firing Line” with Steve Allen’s old “Meeting of Minds,” certainly was a hit on stage.
A record audience for a library event turned out to see its executive director, Crosby Kemper III, interviewing “Tom Pendergast,” aka UMKC professor Bill Worley. And there was another overflow crowd for the encore, which was taped as a pilot and airs at 8 p.m. on KCPT.
