Aaron Keith Harris
2008-04-04 08:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

After catching up on the first four episodes this week, I’m eagerly awaiting the fifth installment of HBO’s seven-part “John Adams” miniseries, airing Sunday.

So far, it’s by far the best dramatic portrayal of the personalities and ideas of what is truly America’s greatest generation. HBO and executive producer Tom Hanks spent liberally on actors, costumes and location shoots. So liberally, I wish they scraped something off the top of their budget to give “The Wire” several more episodes and a proper series ending.

In a role that will no doubt win him several awards, Tom Wilkinson (“Michael Clayton,” “In the Bedroom”) gets just right Benjamin Franklin’s eccentric brilliance without lapsing into caricature. And the brilliant Laura Linney’s Abigail Adams reveals many facets that form a perfect portrait: Long-suffering lover, proto-feminist and stressed-out housewife, with a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

There are a few jarring notes, however, such as the prosthetic nose on David Morse (George Washington) that’s more comical than actor Owen Wilson’s actual nose. And Stephen Dillane deftly gives us a meditative Thomas Jefferson, who is calmly horrified when edits are made to his Declaration of Independence. But Dillane’s Jefferson looks up to Paul Giamatti’s Adams, who was in reality eight inches shorter than the 6-foot-3-inch Virginia gentleman farmer.

But these are small matters compared with Giamatti’s Adams, a man equal parts ordinary lawyer and farmer, vain politician, and, most importantly, fierce patriot jealous of his rights and those of Massachusetts, his country.

When the Boston Massacre inflames the city’s passion for war, he dutifully accepts the unpopular job of defending the British soldiers, cajoling witnesses to step forward with the truth. When word comes that British troops are marching from Lexington to Concord, he drops his shovel and scatters into the house for his musket.

Though not a radical libertarian like his cousin Sam, Adams knew this first battle meant negotiations had failed, no matter what conciliatory measures sat on the table.

“We must support them with guns and leadership and faith in what they do,” Adams says to Abigail, describing the mere “country boys” who drove the professional British back from Concord’s North Bridge. “If I have to stand and rail until my voice breaks and my legs collapse beneath me, this time, Congress will act.”

John Adams realized that once you’re in a war, however you arrived there, you must be in it to win it. Many in today’s Congress don’t seem to get that.

The third installment finds Adams joining Franklin in Paris to lobby for money, guns, ships and men. Franklin is content to enjoy his celebrity and be diplomatically correct with the French, but Adams is all business.

“I must study politics and war so that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy,” Adams tells a banquet table of powder-faced French fops. “My sons must study navigation, commerce and agriculture so that their children will have the right to study painting and poetry and music.”

In Internet-connected, video-gamed America, we’re long past the third phase of that cycle. Whether we like it or not, we’re back at the war and politics stage.

Most of us of value our individual rights enough to defend them against Islamofascism and other outside threats.

One wishes we were jealous enough to protect them — and to reassert those that have been lost — from our own democratic desires for security and prosperity and from our rulers who gladly satisfy them.

Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at aaronkeithharris@gmail.com.