TV REVIEW

A gripping, if none too glossy, look at a revolutionary

BY GLENN GARVIN

ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com

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JUMP

• John Adams, 8-9:15 p.m. Sunday, HBO

John Adams, HBO's new historical miniseries, lasts 8 ½ hours spread over two months. But its signature moment occurs early in Sunday's debut episode. Adams, who in years to come will be among the most sizzling firebrands of the American Revolution -- and, eventually, the second U.S. president -- is glaring at a courtroom full of his baleful fellow Massachusetts colonists who want to hang the men he is defending: a squad of British soldiers who fired on a crowd of colonial protesters and killed five of them in an bloody encounter known as the Boston Massacre.

''Disregard these uniforms; consider them men,'' Adams urges the jurors in a quivering voice. ``We must take care lest, blown away by a torrent of passion, we make shipwreck of conscience.''

John Adams is a story of passion: how it can ennoble men, or debase them into murderous mobs; how it can empower ideas, or overwhelm them. It's about the passion that birthed a country, about the passion that enthralled a couple even while pushing them apart. It's about a war between passion and intellect that has shaped and sometimes disfigured U.S. politics right up through this morning's newspaper.

Based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, John Adams is a sweeping account of this country's painful birth and uncertain infancy, starting from the Boston Massacre trial of 1770 and ending with the deaths of Adams and his Declaration of Independence co-author Thomas Jefferson within a few hours of each other on July 4, 1826.

KEEPING FOCUSED

But even with all the accoutrements of a costume-drama epic (5,000 extras! Two million feet of film! 832 special-effects shots!), John Adams is a carefully focused and almost painfully intimate work that tells its story through the conflicted personal and political relationships of a few characters.

Chief among them, of course, is Adams himself, an unlikely choice as the leading man of a Hollywood blockbuster or, for that matter, a revolution. Short and tubby, irascible even with friends, a pugnacious foe of public tyranny and, in private, its forceful practitioner, he was a respected figure but never a beloved one. (Certainly he had no illusions on that score. ''I have no talent for politics,'' he warned when approached to join the first Continental Congress.)

He railed against British autocracy and was the only one of the founding fathers who never owned a slave. But as president he signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, a series of laws intended to crush political opposition that would surely have been labeled fascist if the word had been invented yet.

Yet Adams was one of the towering intellects of the Revolution and one of its most compelling witnesses through his diaries and the thousands of startlingly eloquent letters he exchanged with his wife Abigail. All his papers survived and are the source of virtually every word of the dialogue in screenwriter Kirk Ellis' script.

Ellis -- who will surely go to his grave as the only man ever to write TV movies on both John Adams and the Three Stooges -- has used Adams' works to create a wondrously full and nuanced portrait of the man, which is brought fully to life by Paul Giamatti, who played the truculent failed writer of 2004's Sideways.

Together they present an Adams whose intelligence is potent enough that he can win acquittals for the British soldiers accused of the Boston Massacre, yet also so preening that he can fulminate to his children on the precise percentage of duck feces to be used in fertilizer. (``Manure is an art, and I consider myself an accomplished artist.'')

DUELING INTELLECTS

Most fascinatingly, they capture the contradictory intellectual impulses that tugged at Adams all his life. Deeply, fundamentally conservative, he for years considered himself a critic of British rule of the colonies, but not a foe.

''The crown is misguided, but it is not despotic,'' he tells his wife. ``People are in need of strong governance, Abigail. Most men are weak and evil and vicious.''

Even when British rule grew so heavy-handed that Adams turned irrevocably against the king, he shared none of the libertarian impulses of Jefferson. ''You have a disconcerting lack of faith in your fellow man,'' chides Jefferson. Shoots back Adams: ``And you display a dangerous excess of faith in your fellow man.''

It's Jefferson's view that has mainly prevailed -- in rhetoric, if not always in practice -- in our appreciation of American history. But Adams' misgivings about the nature of man take on a chilling reality at times in the miniseries. In one scene, a mob seizes a British tax collector, strips him naked and douses him in tar and feathers. The man's unearthly shriek as the scalding tar strikes his flesh is a reminder that this was no fraternity prank.

That unstinting refusal to romanticize history or wrap it in banners and slogan marks every minute of John Adams. It's particularly pointed in noting that the Revolution was triggered at least as much by economics as concern for civil liberty. At one point, ship owner John Hancock (who would later make it a point to sign the Declaration of Independence in letters large enough that King George could read his name without spectacles) exhorts a crowd to rise against the British chokehold on colonial trade.

''I'm an honest man being strangled by monopoly!'' he shouts, as the spectators rumble sympathetically -- and a cargo of slaves stands by, unnoticed.

The picture turns downright harrowing when John Adams is portraying the war itself. Actual battle is little present in the show -- Adams was a politician, not a soldier and spent much of the war in Europe soliciting money for the colonial army -- but its aftermath is. Even victories left a trail of corpses face down in the mud and men screaming as their cannonball-mangled legs were hacked off by battlefield surgeons.

At that, war was only slightly more grim than ordinary life in a hard, mean 19th century world where electricity did not exist and medical practice was barely a step or two above superstition. The show's most horrifying scenes take place during a smallpox epidemic as Abigail Adams, her husband away on a political mission, decides whether to trust her children's lives to the primitive science of vaccination.

GREAT PERFORMANCES

Abigail, who often found herself managing the family affairs for years at a time as her husband disappeared on diplomatic and political assignments, is played with flinty resolve by Laura Linney (The Savages). An early feminist who scandalized her husband's Southern colleagues with her outspoken anti-slavery views, Abigail loved her husband deeply and understood the importance of her work -- but not without chafing at his frequent absences and sense of male entitlement. ''Why do boys have all the pleasure?'' asks her daughter as the family men embark on yet another adventure. ''Because we let them,'' replies Abigail bitterly.

There are bravo performances galore in John Adams, from Stephen Dillane (TheHours) as a diffident Jefferson to David Morse (Disturbia) as a regally dignified George Washington.

The best of the bunch may be veteran actor Tom Wilkinson as the resourceful and randy Benjamin Franklin, disguising his political guile with playfully scandalous aphorisms. ''I'm an extreme moderate,'' he assures his colleagues at one meeting. ''I believe anybody not in favor of moderation and compromise should be castrated.'' Many a figure who crossed him, from Adams to King George, learned he wasn't kidding.