Franklin
When it comes to chronicling the founding myths of America, few screen stories are as engaging and rich as HBO’s “John Adams.” This makes for an interesting challenge for writer Kirk Ellis, who has been focused on Adams’ contemporaries throughout his career. In this 2024 project co-written with Howard Korder, Ellis tackles the life of Benjamin Franklin in another eight episode miniseries on Apple TV+. The tone is quite different, or rather more relaxed in “Franklin,” which features one of America’s most flamboyant libertines as the main character.
The year is 1776, a time period when the Revolutionary War is at its peak; America, in order to promote its monetary and logistical support from France, sends Benjamin Franklin (portrayed in an auto-ironic way by Michael Douglas) with his adolescent grandson and aide Temple (Noah Jupe). The boys set out to adjust themselves with the French culture and society as they are determined to get to the mates with deep pockets who would release the central reservoir of the French enemy’s Machine. At the beginning “Franklin” depicts both Benjamin’s and Temple’s vigorous and effective interaction with their French counterparts as they try to see the American boys in these terms. Benjamin attempts to flirt with Anne Louise Brillon de Juoy (wonderful Ludivine Sagnier), while Temple is surrounded by likeminded revolutionaries, including Gilbert du Motier (Theodore Pellerin in “On Becoming a God in Central Florida”), who soon becomes the future Marquis de Lafayette.
Soon, however, as their efforts appear to be more and more fruitful among the French nobility, it seems, they are in great trouble: Brits will not idly watch the risk of Franklin and their opponents appearing in these negotiations as without regard for the war and there are several measures to make the Americans come up with concessions one would be practically to bribe them.
What is even more, Franklin’s physician Edward Bancroft (Daniel Mays) is a double agent trying to balance his care for Franklin while being a spy for the British. Not to mention, Fanklin has to deal with his American counterpart, John Adams (Eddie Marsan), who at a time thought nothing of Franklin’s much more graceful attempt to negotiate with the French. There is also the trio of him and John Joy who constantly fight with each other about the American perspective of its national identity and treatment of allies, as they all try to forge an agreement with Britain at the end of the war.
“Franklin”’s all shapes and sizes of changing priorities can be illustrated with the what has to be termed great opening credits for the show a set of progressive political cartoons showing Franklin getting into all kinds of mischief or intrigue, wittily. Tim van Patten manages to incorporate this quite concisely in his direction, as well as with David Franco’s cinematography . They use greens and blues too rooted in their saturations to paint a France that is still slightly emboldened by its own tawdriness. And still, we are frequently subjected to scenes in which characters nobility whiz against the drapedlog walls of stunning architectural designs. Even Jay Wadley’s score is able to combine the classic formalism associated with the eighteenth century French society with contemporary sound design utilized in flashbacks which invariably present the narrative as that of a a modern political thriller.
There are funny moments as well in Franklin’s character, who is played by Douglas. He is disarmingly calm while attempting to place the image of a historically sharp-witted individual Franklin into his character, though he replaces much of the historical inventiveness with a rather Douglas perspective. Temple Gandfatherly, Gekko hedonistic, yet this is all about the Franklin the show attempts to recreate, the one that would have had if if some of his characters from Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction happened to have time traveled with witty politics on their side.
He may be old but he still knows how to love and be loved. He’s what a playboy would look like in pre-French revolution culture. Douglas approaches the deadpan humor endorsed in the film by Ellis and Korder with a touch lighter than his age would allow his contemporaries, even when Franklin’s distressing condition is pushing him to spend most of the last third lying in bed.
Though he engages them quite effectively, particularly when he ‘father-broods’ over Temple, he appears to come most alive whilst engaging with Adams, who turns up halfway in as though he was Nick Fury who has just come around to pull Ben into the Founders Initiative. The chemistry Marsan brings in with Adams feels very different from what Giamatti was able to present with Ellis in the first 2008 miniseries “Franklin” in that respect is like a long extension of the third episode of that series as it contains a lot of filler that may have left viewers curious as to what followed the condensed retelling of the history in the earlier episodes. Nonetheless, it isn’t unwelcome. He is far better at being blunt and aggressive than Franklin at being carefree and frustrated, and being a first term ways and means man, he has a lot to learn. (One of the more exaggeratedly amusing scenes is when he attempts to talk and learn how to pronounce French in privacy.)
The series doesn’t do well in the areas trying to portray Franklin, since Temple is filled with youthful but admirable sickening resilience as Jupe is trying to play young.
While Franklin encounters difficulties in his modifications to his legacy during the last years of his life, Temple is coming of age as he totally lets go of himself to the endless noise and glamour of the French people. He gets captivated with an opera singer, gets tangled in multiple love stories, and even becomes a page who carries letters around Paris in a way that speeds up the course of events. Boy, if these subplots were to be the only ones, they will carry a show on their own. They would follow storylines so compelling that they would struggle with the more weighty statecraft sections coming from Douglas’ sections; especially in a show that is already over eight hour long, which, during the third viewing in this writer’s life, are rather what they sound like not worth the time. They don’t succeed in serving their purpose, which is providing a contrasting view on Ben Franklin’s more sophisticated statecraft.
“Franklin”, like most historical dramas, has its share of drama but most importantly, as the title suggests, is about the involvement of Franklin in the delicate processes that eventually led up to the formation of a republic nearly a whole ocean apart. After all, there were many things that enabled America to be free from British colonization, other than the musket warfare at Lexington and Concord, such as the wits, the sweet talking, and often times, plainly deceptive promises that were made to our allies. What is accomplished by Van Patten and his crew is that there is a transformation into a young nation that needs to be nurtured and is developing during the ruins of an ancient order, and the tempered excitement every party shares for such prospects.
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