I don't expect to cry at movies, or TV shows, or books. Even the ones that are tagged as tearjerkers don't get me. Frankly, those are more likely to leave me with a stone face, if only for being slightly more manipulative, slightly more shameless in trying to get its audience to show emotion. Though I've teared up a few times at entertainment over the past few years, notably the last 20 minutes of Toy Story 3 and the last scene of the Lost series finale (yes, I am a nerd), I don't do it often, and I don't ever have any inkling of when it will happen, or what will get me. So getting teary at the end of the seven-part HBO miniseries John Adams, which was reaired on July 4, was not something I planned on.
Circumstances always get us in unexpected places, and so it was with John Adams. I began watching this gargantuan project the night after the seven parts aired back to back, but only the first few minutes. I rarely have enough time to set aside from an hour or 90 minutes of television (at least, when it's not something I already consider to be appointment TV), so I figured I'd watch as often as I could, for as long as I could. I was initially struck and mildly surprised at how much of the miniseries, directed by now-Oscar winner Tom Hooper (and I will get to him in a bit), is a love story between a happily married couple, John and Abigail Adams, both played magnificently by Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney. I've never read the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by David McCullough, so I really didn't know what to expect going in.
Because of timing issues, I ended up watching the bulk of the miniseries over a two-day period where I was all by myself in my house, unless you count our cats. My wife was staying over at her sister's, keeping her company and helping out with her two kids as her husband traveled to the Grand Canyon with a friend. This left me at home, mostly to tend to our cats and to have wild parties. Or watch John Adams. Now, mind you, a lot of this series, written by Kirk Ellis and Michelle Ashford, is about Adams' march through history, from defending Redcoats against his fellow citizens to nearly willing the Declaration of Independence into existence to becoming the second President of the United States. But the most constant story throughout the series, which encompasses over 50 years, is John's love for his wife, and hers for him. He treats her as his equal, and she often guides him in his decision-making. When he leaves for France as an American dignitary, she excoriates him (and he lets her) for leaving her to help their children grow up, making her responsibility even greater by also having to tend to their Massachusetts farm. When they reunite in the fourth installment, it's nothing short of a catharsis, partly because the previous episode left Adams extremely sick. While there is, of course, a medical reason for the illness, you have to wonder if it's a sickness of the heart.
There's too much to cover, really, when talking about John Adams, which didn't seem to get a massive amount of critical love despite winning every possible award it could. (Seriously, when this came up for awards during the fall of 2008 and winter of 2009, I thought Paul Giamatti was winning awards he wasn't even eligible for.) I'm sure plenty more could be dramatized from John Adams' relationships with such revolutionaries as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton, and I crave for even more. But what there is on the screen is truly incredible and powerful. My biggest complaint with the entire series is something that I'm always going to push back against, as long as the man has a career: Tom Hooper can't direct himself out of a paper bag. It's impressive to me that I watched all seven parts and want to watch it again, despite his flat-footed "style," which amounts to taking a normal shot and having the camera present it at a wacky angle. (The worst offender is in the final hour, when we watch a grizzled and aged John Adams walk through the fields of his farm. Simple enough, except the camera is turned upside down. Literally.) This is a case of every other element, especially the acting and subtle yet powerful writing, elevating itself from the man behind the camera.
While there's plenty to praise from in front of the camera (I feel like I could take up an entire post just listing each actor and character in this damn thing), Giamatti, Linney, Tom Wilkinson as Ben Franklin, Stephen Dillane as Jefferson, and Zeljko Ivanek as John Dickson all deliver standout performances. Giamatti has been one of my favorite actors for the last decade or so, and watching him in John Adams is watching the performance of a lifetime. He may not be in every single scene, but he dominates the entire series from the first minute. But what got me emotional at the very end was the romance between John and Abigail. Though they ended up spending most of their married lives together (something Abigail comments on in the final chapter), I felt the absence between John and Abigail in the third episode as much as I was about to feel the two-day gap when my wife wasn't in the house. Who knows what that says about me (and don't tell me, I'd rather not know), but there you go.
But what got me was that final chapter, titled "Peacefield," where John and Abigail live out their final days, he rightly concerned that he'd be condemned by historians to obscurity and she trying to encourage him to peacefully enjoy the time he had left on this Earth. When Abigail falls deathly ill, instantly looking as if she's nodded off, it comes as a shock (and honestly, I was glad that her death scene wasn't just looking like she fell asleep, which is the opposite of good drama). When she wakes up once more, half-delirious, and then dies in her husband's arms, it's hard not to be overcome with emotion. It was almost certainly just me being affected by being alone for a couple of days (last week was the first time since I've been married that I didn't sleep in the same bed as my wife), but Paul Giamatti's acting here is titanic and painfully realistic. In this scene and the few that follow, with him alone except for his memories and then, near the end of his life, correspondences with Thomas Jefferson, Giamatti's loneliness just rang so true to me.
Yes, this element of John Adams is clearly manipulation on the filmmakers' parts. I don't care; it worked on me. I was more than mildly beset by the emotion of love lost, though I didn't get as worked up as I did at the end of, say, Toy Story 3. But considering that I had few expectations for John Adams, I came away pleasantly surprised for having been so moved. As a historical adaptation, I was fascinated. As a treatise on why history should look kindly upon John Adams the man, if not John Adams the president, I was convinced. As a story of two people whose love crosses everything including geographical boundaries, I was deeply shaken.
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