The Man Who Was 'Obnoxious and Unpopular'
Hollywood loves a simple story. It loves heroes who are dashing, villains who are clear, and narratives that fit neatly into a two-hour runtime. John Adams, by his own admission, was none of those things. Described by his contemporaries—and even himself—as
“obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular,” he was a character defined by his contradictions. He was vain yet insecure, passionate yet legalistic, and a revolutionary who deeply respected the rule of law. While he possessed immense integrity, defending the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre on principle, he lacked the smooth charm of a Jefferson or the raw ambition of a Hamilton. His were the virtues of a stubborn intellectual, not a matinee idol. This complexity makes him a tough sell for a studio system that prefers its historical figures pre-packaged for easy consumption. Adams doesn’t fit the mold; he is the mold-breaker, a fact that makes for great history but challenging screenwriting.
A Legacy of Ink, Not Action
So much of what made Adams indispensable to the American Revolution is fundamentally un-cinematic. His greatest battles were fought not on a battlefield, but in courtrooms, in congressional committees, and on the pages of his voluminous correspondence with his wife, Abigail. He was the architect of Massachusetts's constitution, a pivotal diplomat who secured crucial loans from the Dutch, and the intellectual engine who pushed a reluctant Congress toward independence. But drafting legal theory and negotiating treaties in Paris lack the visual punch of crossing the Delaware or delivering a fiery speech to a revolutionary mob. While Washington’s heroism was physical and Jefferson’s was philosophical, Adams’s was procedural. It was the hard, unglamorous work of nation-building, a process more suited to a C-SPAN marathon than a summer blockbuster.
The Exception That Proves the Rule
The one great on-screen portrayal of Adams only serves to highlight why there are not more of them. The 2008 HBO miniseries “John Adams” is a masterpiece, anchored by a towering performance from Paul Giamatti that captures the man in all his difficult glory. The series embraces his vanity, his temper, and his profound loneliness. It is a portrait so rich and nuanced precisely because it had seven episodes—over eight hours—to unpack him. Giamatti’s Adams is brilliant, irritable, and constantly struggling against his own flaws. The series' critical success proved there's an appetite for this kind of complex historical drama, but it also demonstrated that a character this dense cannot be contained by a standard feature film. It took a prestige, long-form television event to do him justice, confirming him as a character too big, and too difficult, for the big screen.
Too Human for a Marble Pedestal
In the end, Adams remains underrated by Hollywood because he was, perhaps, too human. He was not a godlike figure carved from marble. He was a man plagued by self-doubt, desperate for recognition, and fiercely devoted to his wife and his country, often in that order. His story isn't one of effortless genius, but of dogged perseverance. In an era that has embraced anti-heroes and complex protagonists on television, Adams feels like a character whose time should have come. He is the original anti-hero: a man who, despite his own worst impulses, helped forge a nation. Hollywood may prefer the simpler legends of Washington and Jefferson, but in the prickly, profound, and deeply human story of John Adams, it is missing out on one of the greatest characters American history has to offer.
