Netflix’s Death by Lightning dramatizes the brief but important presidency of James Garfield. Outlined in Candace Millard’s 2011 book, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, this fine, but flawed production charts Garfield’s unexpected rise to the White House and the tragedy of his assassination by the deranged loser Charles Guiteau.
Set in the aftermath of the Civil War, the drama opens in the Republican party’s Presidential convention of 1880. Garfield—born in a log cabin and a self-taught Disciples of Christ lay preacher, college president, lawyer, and congressman—gives an inspiring speech supporting the candidacy of fellow Ohio congressman, John Sherman. The speech sparks a grassroots vote that eventually snowballs into his being selected as the compromise candidate to break the deadlocked convention.
His opponent in the Republican run-off was the Civil War hero and sitting president, Ulysses S Grant, who was mired in the swamp of political corruption—plenty of pork and sinecures for cronies funded by the lucrative levies on New York City’s ports. Lincoln-like, Garfield stands as the man from the log cabin who plans to drain the swamp.
Charles Guiteau’s story is woven neatly into Garfield’s. The assassin and his victim are proper opposites: Garfield is a reluctant presidential candidate who rises through his innate modesty, virtue, and decent humanity; Guiteau is an unstable thief, fraud, and pathetically deluded wannabe; Garfield a hardworking, honest, Christian family man; Guiteau a shiftless, lying, failed member of the infamous Oneida free-love commune.
Death by Lightning takes its title from a quotation by Garfield. Mindful of Lincoln’s assassination just fifteen years earlier, and when warned of the danger, Garfield replied that assassination was like death by lightning—unpredictable and not worth worrying about. The drama series succeeds in telling Garfield’s story and leaves us with regret at his loss. If he was the man of authentic integrity that the drama portrays, then he could have been a candidate for Mount Rushmore.
One never knows with historical film depictions whether they are authentic or not because, of course, they are from an antique age. However, Death by Lightning certainly looks authentic. The sumptuous costumes, rich interiors, and the atmosphere of a nation on the rise evoke an America recovering from the Civil War and surging into the Gilded Age.
The acting is also first-rate. Michael Shannon delivers a Garfield with gravitas. Here is a stern, but kindly patriarch: a self-made man who has retained his faith, modesty, and genuine spirit of service. His Garfield is no mere political creature, but a man of deep Protestant piety, a scholar-preacher who quoted Scripture in Cabinet meetings and empathized with the freed slaves.
Matthew Macfadyen plays Charles Julius Guiteau brilliantly as shallow, vain and not only bad, but mad. Macfadyen’s Guiteau is a twitching, scripture-spouting sycophant, and not merely mad but religiously mad—a divinely ordained Oneida nudist convinced that God has appointed him to remove the president. His darting eyes and twitchy smile are laughably disconcerting, as he seeks to ingratiate himself, preen, and pose as a potential officeholder. His request for the consulship of France (while not speaking a word of French), along with his purchase of a pearl-handled revolver because “it will look better in a museum” are particularly pathetic and chilling.
The supporting cast proves equally admirable. Betty Gilpin as Mrs Garfield is a study in dignified Midwestern womanhood. Her restrained anguish at her husband’s bedside, as doctors probe his wounds with unsterilized fingers is (excuse the pun) gut-wrenching. Shea Whigham plays Roscoe Conkling, the swaggering, corrupt New York boss politician who struts through the Senate with a lavender waistcoat, coiffed hair, and another man’s wife on his arm. His partner in crime, VP Chester Arthur (Nick Offerman) surprises when, after Garfield’s assassination, he mends his ways to assume the presidency.
While the series scores points for authenticity, costumes, acting, scenery, and cinematography, it misses the mark in script and subplot. The dialogue is loaded with completely intrusive, indefensible, and anachronistic “F-bombs”. It is impossible to imagine that even the corrupt and unscrupulous characters would casually use such profanity. A quick search reveals that it was a deeply offensive obscenity confined to the coarsest contexts.
Furthermore, while it is historically true that Guiteau resorted to prostitution and joined the Oneida free-love commune, there is no reason why we need to have the nudity and coupling portrayed on screen.
The profanity, nudity, and explicit sex scenes aside, Death by Lightning also reveals the weakness of the current fashion for extended film series rather than the conventional, tightly scripted two-hour film. On the one hand, extending the story to four, six, eight, or more episodes allows for more character and subplot development, but it also encourages padding, a slower pace, and slack plotting.
Death by Lightning had the potential of being a historical drama comparable to Spielberg’s Lincoln. Instead the producers lapsed into an all-too-easy slack and gratuitously spicy romp.
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The featured image is courtesy of IMDb.
LOVED this movie
You refer to Guiteau as Garfield’s assassin. Yes and no. As Candace Millard’s biography makes abundantly clear, Guiteau pulled the trigger, but Garfield’s incompetent physician, Dr. Bliss, who refused to believe in the reality of germs, was Garfield’s ultimate killer. As Millard states, it was not a bullet that killed Garfield; Civil War veterans were alive and well with more lead in them than Guiteau’s one bullet, which hit no major arteries, organs, or muscles. In fact, the autopsy showed that Garfield’s body had done with the bullet exactly what the human body is designed to do — formed a membrane around it, rendering it harmless. Garfield’s demise resulted from the infections brought on by Bliss’s ignorance, stubbornness, and blunderings.
I did mention the “unsterilized fingers”. You are correct that it was the infection that killed him. I think Guiteau used this as part of his defense–arguing that he did not kill Garfield, but the incompetent doctor did.
Thank you Father !
My wife and I enjoyed it. But she had to hold on to the remote to fast forward as needed.