John Adams (Blu-Ray/3 Disc) (2008)

Salon.com 7 of 10
Remember when the epic television miniseries featured earth-shattering romances and big, shiny stallions and riotous town meetings with heroes and villains clearly delineated? The founders of our great nation would fight valiantly and give speeches that moved crowds of attractive blonds to tears, and then they'd get on their horses and ride off to fight the bloodthirsty redcoats...But these are the days of David Milch's "Deadwood" and Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" and this is HBO, home of the story that's stubbornly grubby and full of stuttering and awkward moments and buzzing flies. The trend has swung past realism to realism through a dirty window, realism with a bad attitude and a hangover...Based on the book by David McCullough and directed by Tom Hooper, "John Adams" counterbalances heroism -- this was a man who helped to liberate the colonies from British rule, after all -- with dreary details: Abigail Adams is left at home with her children in the dead of winter, while her husband is off fine-tuning the language of the Declaration of Independence with other noble men. Abigail writes John love letters, sure, but she's also forced to grab a rifle and run to the door of their farmhouse at any sign of trouble. She and the kids witness haunting sights of injured Americans return from battle with the redcoats...But it's the casting of Giamatti as Adams that says it all. Giamatti is an almost defiantly ordinary-looking man, and that's a crucial detail as far as author David McCullough is concerned. In his book, the caption underneath the first paintings of a puffily wigged Adams and his wife reads, "Her decided nature is clearly evident, while he might be almost any untested, well-fed young man of the time." I believe what he means to express is that Adams looks like a fat frat boy with a squirrel glued to his head...Far from epic, "John Adams" is a biopic as intense and moody as the man himself. - Heather Havrilesky
 
The Onion A.V. Club 8 of 10
John Adams was one of the unlikeliest founding fathers, more swept up in the events of the American Revolution than out in front of them. Because of that, he's been an ideal subject for two ground-level studies of how America came to be: David McCullough's epic biography John Adams, and HBO's seven-part, nearly nine-hour adaptation of same. As portrayed by Paul Giamatti on HBO, Adams is a preening neurotic, worried about how his peers perceive him. And yet he's hardly unsympathetic. If anything, Adams' foibles help humanize the radical changes of the late 18th century...John Adams begins with Adams' defense of the British soldiers involved in the "Boston Massacre" and ends with his death on July 4th, 1826--fifty years after the adoption of the Declaration Of Independence...John Adams makes the American experiment look fragile and tentative, in the hands of a small group of men who couldn't agree on whether to replicate the culture and government of England or to start over with a clean slate...The miniseries also feels a little shapeless at times, and could probably have been streamlined without losing its message. But like the best TV, it's compulsively watchable, and in spending over an hour in each key era of Adams' adult life, Hooper encourages viewers to note the changing fashions, the appalling dental hygiene, and the subtlety of the performances by Giamatti and Laura Linney (who plays Adams' wife Abigail). John Adams begins with the eerie, apocalyptic sight of men in wigs marching down muddy streets behind "Join Or Die" banners, and it ends in rooms that look warm and domestic and distinctly American. It travels far over the course of five decades, and yet what's most striking about John Adams is that so much about it--like so much about the nation's history--feels unresolved. - Noel Murray