Sunday, February 13, 2000

‘Sally Hemings’ miniseries based on historical material

When in the course of sweeps events, it becomes necessary to air a historical miniseries, how about another one in which an American president carries on an affair with a woman who is not his wife?
  Many a TV miniseries has made entertainment hay out of the extramarital romantic entanglements of presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy and even LBJ.
  And there was that long-running real-life miniseries last year about our current Commandment-Breaker-in-Chief and the pouty-lipped White House intern, what’s-her-name.
  CBS declares its dependence on historical soap opera by turning back the clock to the 18th and 19th centuries for "Sally Hemings: An American Scandal" (8 p.m. tonight and Wednesday), which focuses on a supposed 38-year illicit relationship between Thomas Jefferson and a slave with whom he might have fathered five children.
  Historians and several generations of descendants on both sides are still arguing over whether the love affair really happened at all. Headlines as far back at 1802 (during Jefferson’s first term in office) decried Jefferson’s liaison with his "mahogany-coloured charmer." Recent DNA tests, reported in the British magazine Nature and in U.S. News & World Report, connected several black families with Jefferson’s offspring, although skeptics maintain it was Jefferson’s brother who fathered the slave’s children and not the president himself.
  The miniseries, however, doesn’t hesitate to assert that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings were longtime lovers.
  "Based on the historical material that I was presented with, there was a 38-year relationship between this man and this woman," said "Sally Hemings" teleplay writer Tina Andrews. "When Hemings showed up in Paris, Jefferson, who had been dating other women, stopped dating anybody else and never, ever dated anyone else seriously, nor did he ever marry again until the day he died."
  According to the miniseries, Jefferson, widowed at 38, was handsome, wealthy and willing to cross racial and cultural barriers for love when, as Ambassador to France, he first became aware of the beautiful Miss Hemings. She had accompanied Jefferson’s daughter to Paris. Hemings’ brother James was already in Jefferson’s service there. Their mother, a slave at Jefferson’s Monticello plantation, had happily sent both children abroad as servants, believing they could remain in France as freed slaves. She was crushed when Sally returned, pregnant with Jefferson’s child, and remained at Monticello.
  It’s certainly an intriguing story. But the miniseries, as most of them do, plays it out as a soap opera, replete with duvet-diving love scenes and smoldering looks in the flickering candlelight.
  At times, the dialogue insults the dignity of both parties.
  "I don’t know no French!" Sally wails when her mother tells her she’s going off to Jefferson’s residence in Paris.
  To Jefferson, she says, "Is I in trouble, Massuh?," coming across as a prettified Butterfly McQueen.
  Later, when she and Jefferson are in each other’s arms, he murmurs, "Sally, my heart and my head wrestle with the consequences of this," a line that sounds like it was written with a quill on parchment, instead of on a word processor.
  Between the fiddling around, "Sally Hemings" features a lot of annoying fiddle music, to which the happy slaves and plantation dwellers dance whenever Jefferson appears at Monticello.
  The most cringe-worthy scenes take place in Paris during the French Revolution, when a mere handful of extras storm a backlot Bastille, over which one can glimpse the Hollywood Hills.
  The cast of "Sally Hemings" features New Zealander Sam Neill as Jefferson, British actress Carmen Ejogo as Sally, Diahann Carroll as Sally’s mother and Mario Van Peebles as Sally’s brother. Mare Winningham plays Jefferson’s disapproving daughter.
  Also this week