Past And Present.(Television program review)(Video recording review)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

Founding Fathers, glamorous working girls, and classic musical comedies give Joan Juliet Buck the perfect spring mix.

John Adams, a stumpy lawyer with a face like a furiously cogitating baby's and a penchant for the prolix, was the least glamorous but most thoughtful of the Founding Fathers. Neither an imposing figure like Washington nor an elegant aesthete like Jefferson, with none of Franklin's cynical wiles, he slowly came to the conclusion that the American colonies needed "a complete and irrevocable independence."

HBO's seven-part adaptation of David McCullough's massive John Adams biography reminds you, possibly in the nick of time, that the birth of our country was a moral act. The film is about every form of independence--the self-reliance necessary to survival in eighteenth-century America, the need to break away from dependence on higher forms of authority and to assert freedom from fear. It's about a country, and about a couple.

John Adams begins, chilled and raw-knuckled, at the Boston Massacre of 1770, proceeds to the Continental Congress, on to Adams's visits to the French court and Dutch bankers, and back to America, with an urgency that makes it a uniquely intimate epic. The director, British prodigy Tom Hooper, brings the kind of tactile realism that was once seen in Eastern European films and is becoming the hallmark of the best of HBO. The redcoats on trial in 1770 are skinny and haggard; when Adams gets a fever in Holland, the pace changes to the muddy stumble of a blocked head; when Abigail gets a doctor to inoculate her and the children against smallpox with pus taken from a victim, the fear and pain are palpable.

Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney are remarkable as John and Abigail Adams. Giamatti's Adams is a man of such high standards that he can never think well of himself. He moves from success to success with an abiding sense of failure. After declaring at the 1776 Congress, "We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any," and asking, "How few of the human race have ever had an opportunity of choosing a system of government for themselves and their children?" he sits down with Franklin to mutter, "An idle misspence of time--a waste of breath."

"I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular," he says to Jefferson.