ADAM JOHN MALAYALAM MOVIE USA SERIES
The last episode of the series depicts the death of “Nabby” Adams, the daughter of John and Abigail, from breast cancer.
Wikipedia has already provided a depressing piece of proof. Undoubtedly, it is already being used in classrooms.įictionalized history can gain traction with alarming ease, spreading both factual errors and fundamental misconceptions: people tend to believe what they see on the screen. Such accolades, however, only compound the problem: since the show was well-done, dramatic, entertaining and widely praised, it will be all the more widely seen, and its audience will all the more readily assume it is definitive. Paul Giamatti, Laura Linney and Tom Wilkinson deserved their acting trophies purely as a drama, the series deserved its best miniseries win as well. Recently, it has been liberally bedecked with Emmy awards. Yet historical dramas, as Adams might have said, should not delude posterity with fictions under the guise of poetical, graphical or cinematic license.Īs a drama, HBO’s series is generally first-rate, including an impressively authentic evocation of the 18th and early 19th century physical environment. Fictional motivations and incidents are created as if historical actors were fictional characters, to be defined and depicted in whatever manner best suits the script. But it is truly astonishing how often “historical” dramatizations make changes that are simply unnecessary, that rewrite fundamental historical reality to create ‘dramatic’ moments, which are, in fact, no more dramatic than the real events would be if depicted honestly. Likewise, it is sometimes necessary to restage an exchange of letters as a face-to-face discussion, to roll longer events into a single scene, and to compress people’s coming and goings. Using quotations from letters as the basis for spoken dialogue is, for example, a reasonable technique, allowing a historical figure’s attitudes and ideas to be accurately reflected. Some degree of compression and alteration is, of course, unavoidable in any dramatization: history is too complex to be rendered literally on film. Yet, just as scriptwriters adapting great literary works for the screen often seem to think they know better than the authors themselves, the “John Adams” screenwriters seemed to think they could improve upon the actual past McCullough had chronicled. I have issues with McCullough’s interpretive scope – the degree to which he situates Adams in the political context of his time – but his factual narrative, though somewhat skimpy before 1776, is solidly researched, well-presented, and reliable. These problems do not stem from David McCullough’s book, on which the series claims to be based. But, from the very start of the series, far more serious and gratuitous distortions abound, simultaneously exaggerating Adams’s centrality and the hostility he faced. Such a change is not unreasonable in a dramatization. This scene itself is actually partly fictionalized: the quote comes from a letter written several years earlier, when Adams first heard of Trumbull’s project. It was a curious admonition for the screenwriters to include, for the HBO series itself does, consistently and often egregiously, exactly what Adams is shown warning against. “Do not,” he chides the artist, “let our posterity be deluded with fictions under the guise of poetical or graphical license.” Adams scoffs at its distortion of the real event’s complexity, warning that it falsifies history for the sake of dramatic presentation. In the last episode of HBO’s recent and much-lauded miniseries, “John Adams,” the aged former president is taken to see artist John Trumbull’s enormous new painting, depicting the signing of the Declaration of Independence.