I've been watching, with great interest, the HBO mini-series John Adams based on David McCullough's best-selling book and I have enjoyed it, for the most part. However, the portrayals of both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson leave somethng to be desired.
Now, I realize that these were not perfect men. Franklin was a womanizer, as was Jefferson. Jefferson had slaves and fathered at least one child with one of them. (Not something you would expect from the author of the Declaration of Independence.) But the film portrays them as merely bit players in our nation's struggle and rise from Great Britain. Not only that, but it also seems to say that these men were barely competent with the tasks given to them.
Franklin is played as a withering opportunist who was non-committal in nearly every aspect of his public service, preferring to advocate whichever position granted him the most ease and least work.
Jefferson is seen as little more than a man-child. Bad posture, seemingly always distracted and openly flirting with Abigail Adams.
While the men we are raised to know as the Founding Fathers were not deities and were certainly not perfect, I think the film does a dishonor to these men by emphasizing their weaknesses, both real and imagined, in place of hardly any mention of their rightful place in our history.
John Adams was indeed a great man, warts and all. Yet to portray everyone around him as incompetent or over their heads while the great Adams alone fights mightily on is a bit much, I should think.
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