1x07 Peacefield

[8.3/10] A quite fine end to the series. With John Adams safely away from the halls of power and the swarm of events from well-known history, the show can tell a more personal story, one dressed in the slow decline of years that brings with it such softening. John Adams is still a grump between the end of his presidency and his ninetieth year, but he is also one increasingly willing to appreciate the journey he’s been on and those who’ve been at his side through it, gradually losing the bitterness that once threatened to overtake him.

It is both a sad and a happy ending. Sad, because John loses his daughter and his wife, his precious little girl and his lodestar in a world he had so much trouble navigating. It is happy because he reconciles with Thomas Jefferson, rejoices in his living children, and grows to appreciate the tiniest mundane delights of this mortal coil.

Adams reconciles himself as consigned to the dustbin of history, predicting (through the writer’s present day lens) that his accomplishments will be passed over for those of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. He seems to want to correct this, to write some account that tells his side and stakes his accomplishments, only to eventually accept, partly at his more esteemed colleague’s urging, that the history of their revolution is already lost. He lives long enough to see it distorted and mythologized, put on a pedestal that removes it from the grim realities of war and politics that don’t fit on even the largest canvas.

John Adams itself is meant as a remedy for that. Many characters voice the implicit thoughts of the show’s creators. Benjamin Rush in particular describes the protagonist and his sometimes foe, sometimes friend Thomas Jefferson as the “North and South” of American revolutionary thought. That’s the closest the mini-series ever comes to expressly stating that its subject is an unfairly overlooked figure in American history, but so much of this finale points toward thesis, whether it’s warranted or not.

Still, it is a slow, melancholy but warm ending, one rooted in Adams’s autumn years in Peacefield, seeing the world pass him by but growing more content with it. The hardest points to watch are Abigail losing Nabby, only for John to then lose Abigail. Their marriage is the backbone of this story, and the tenderness they exchange in their final moments, and in the poetic love letters they send to one another, read over the series’s closing images, lingers as a tribute to the strength, depth, and authenticity of their relationship as depicted on the screen.

It’s a finale given over to much poetry. The kind letters exchanged between Adams and Jefferson lend themselves to the eloquence of the two men. Theirs has been a rocky friendship, one challenged when in his post-Presidency repose, John learns that Thomas undermined him in the press, in a bid to overtake him. And yet, the camera takes care to note the bust of Adams in Jefferson’s home, and the bust of Jefferson in Adams’s, a sign of the care between them that lets them hold one another in their hearts despite, and because of, all they’ve been through.

The images do much of the work here despite those lyrical lines. Peacefield is an appropriately bucolic setting for John Adams’s final days. Hooper’s camera devolves into the usual, odd dutch angles in places. But it also shows John wandering through resplendent green fields, lost in the waving blades of grass that surround him in a wide shot, gazing down at a small bud in the canary sunlight. Here is a man whom we meet trudging through the cold, oppressed by the elements, and whom we leave bathed in the sun’s warm rays, beatified by the earth itself.

The series indulges a bit much in its final sequences, leaning hard into the remarkable coincidence stacked upon coincidence of Adams and Jefferson not only passing away on the same date, but that date being the fiftieth anniversary of America’s founding. It treats the pair’s demise as the last gasp of a lost age, the final members of the class gone to glory, leaving behind something much different than what they started. There is a holiness and a mournfulness to it, a testament to the peace they found away from the pressures of politics and the worry that their battles will be refought time and again in the years to come.

Most of all, the film highlights the personal sacrifices required to build the nation. In Adams final speech to the audience, he rests on the thought the process was not easy nor beautiful, but full of pain, and can only hope that those pains will have been worth it for what emerged from them.

It’s a kind sentiment to leave us with. John Adams implicitly calls for the same deification of its eponymous statesman that his compatriots received. But the mini-series itself cuts against that, showing him noble in some respects but flawed in many others. It serves both Adams’s hagiography but also his diminishment, even as it ends on that note of his accomplishments and contributions going overlooked, particularly his personal costs expended on the way.

The show was better when it explored those personal costs, the more introspective side of what it was like to experience given moments from the inside. It was weaker when it tried to condense the broad sweep of history into a handful of jam-packed hours. Plenty of past works have told the story of the revolution. The steady march of famous figures and storied events came to feel like filler or, at best, boxes dutifully checked off, rather than new gems dredged up from old history.

In other moments though, the show founded itself on the relationship between John and Abigail, on the slower moments where their friendships with others percolated and simmered, on the steady realization of one’s place in history and the slow fade of marks made. That will be the legacy of John Adams for me -- the quiet moments when the story captured a real human being apart from his failures and accomplishments -- rather than its tribute to Adams’s own legacy, or lack thereof.