John Adams

Having watched our first rented video at home in a year or two, an HBO made-for-cable TV movie (“Recount”) back in November, we tried it again last week, with the first two segments of HBO’s dramatization of David McCullough’s “John Adams.” I’ve even done some research on the U.S. revolution, and my family and I are big fans of the musical “1776.” (My family had the Broadway soundtrack in heavy rotation when I was in elementary school in Gainesville, and we watched the movie in the theaters when it came out – in Boston! Vincent, Stephanie, and I saw the musical at Otterbein College in Westerville.) The first hour-long statement starts very dark, and slow – and actor Paul Giamatti is not always a barrel of laughs anyway – but it shows Adams interestingly with mixed feelings about the U.S. revolution (especially interesting considering his subsequent vehemence in support of independence). (And the dramatization also shows some of the Patriot “pranks” for what they were – direct action torture.) By the time we get to the second part, on independence, the HBO film version tracks “1776” a great deal. So much of some of the dialogue is the same – and the characters – that I half expected them to break out in song (“Everywhere a Lee, a Lee”; “He plays the violin”; and so on). The HBO film omits most of the debate over whether to denounce slavery explicitly in the Declaration of Independence (which generated the number that captured Vincent’s attention most in “1776”: “Molasses to Rum to Slaves”). It’s fascinating to watch Adams as he meets the other of the first three presidents – George Washington and his later rival Thomas Jefferson. As good an actor as Giamatti is, he just doesn’t catch me as William Daniels [pictured below with Howard da Silva] did in “1776” on film, and nor do most of the other HBO actors vs. their “1776” counterparts. Almost stealing the show is the lone “Recount” repeater, British actor Tom Wilkinson, of “Michael Clayton” fame, who is fabulous as Benjamin Franklin. (Laura Linney [pictured above with Giamatti] is great as always as Abigail Adams.) We hope to see part three later.

Click here and then press play to see the opening number from “1776” (sorry about the language): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HD1x_kZRQQ

-- Perry