Thomas Jefferson: A View from the Mountain (1995 TV Movie) User Reviews

Focus on the man and you will understand the nation.

[Bernie4444 · 10/10 · 28 April 2024]

There are plenty of good presentations on Thomas Jefferson. You will also find them as part of other presentations on other key founding fathers.

This presentation however is unique in that it focuses on Thomas Jefferson and how he lived. We get to rebuild Monticello together several times. We get an in-depth vision of the Hemmings slave family including Sally Hemmings. We see the conflict between Jefferson and Adams from Jefferson's side. There are references to the Louisiana purchase and what this meant to Jefferson. There is a particular focus on many of his paradoxes including slavery.

You may want to watch this after watching "Thomas Jefferson: a film by Ken Burns." Where Ken Burns thinks that Jefferson in a sense was frivolous and is constantly changing of Monticello, this documentary sees it as part of his dynamic nature and compares it to the constant changing of the early government.

Nice pictures, but shallow analysis & plenty of gloss

[mazadroz · 5/10 · 29 May 2006]

A picture is worth...-goes the old saying, and the footage assembled in this documentary is nice and does much to illuminate Jefferson, his times, his contemporaries, his places, etc.

However, this being a documentary, it suffers from two common flaws:

-First, it is shallow, for how can you cram a life, let alone Jefferson's into two hours?

-Second, it is assembled by people who admire the subject, and who are want to gloss over the uglier side, ie,bias.

On the first point - and admittedly it is a bit unfair to expect depth from a documentary - I will confine myself to saying that, while this documentary spends perhaps thirty seconds on Jefferson's role as Secretary of State in Washington's cabinet, it devotes perhaps five to ten minutes on his alleged relationship with Sally Hemmings. Which is more important, the man's sex life (and granted it does reveal something of his character), or the ferocious battles waged in the first cabinet between Jefferson and Hamilton, which led to the rise of parties and the transference of the national capital from New York to the banks of the Potomoc (not even mentioned)?

On the second point, and elaborating on the first, no mention was made of Jefferson's rivalry with Hamilton, and their respective visions for the US: "agrarian republic" vs industrial-urban republic. Nor does this documentary mention Jefferson's often sentimental radicalism: his giddiness at the French revolution and eagerness to pull the US into that conflict. How this miscalculation eventually discredited him in Washington's cabinet. And how he resigned after being repeatedly outfoxed by Hamilton.

What pretense to painting a balanced portrait can a biographical piece possibly have without letting the subject's enemies speak for themselves?

This movie tries so hard to be even handed, but its heart so much wants to defend Jefferson as good

[richard-1787 · 5/10 · 19 May 2020]

This documentary about Thomas Jefferson is very poorly subtitled. It really has very little to do with "the view from the mountain" (Monticello), and everything to do with Jefferson's views on slavery and slaves. That's really what the movie should have been subtitled, because that is the focus, indeed the obsession, of this movie, which pays little attention to the rest of Jefferson's life and career.

"Did he have sex with Sally Hemmings??????" That's the question at the heart of this movie. Given that, it's a shame that it does such a poor job of answering the question. Even years ago, when I lived in Charlottesville, Jefferson's home, we knew about the results of the DNA tests on Sally Hemming's descendants. But what this movie doesn't bother to mention is that those descendants were also very likely the descendants of relations between Jefferson's relative Dabney Carr and the Hemmings family, which would have explained the presence of Jefferson's DNA in the Hemmings descendants even if Jefferson himself had not fathered any children with her.

I don't know if Jefferson had sex with Sally Hemmings - and I truly do not care. I also don't know if, if there was a sexual relationship, it resulted in children. And again, I do not care.

What I didn't like about this movie, among other things, is that the makers of this movie were so clearly upset by that possibility, and so clearly intent on apologizing for it.

Hell, if two people want to have consensual - and I stress consensual - sex, that's their business and no one else's. Good for them. But I really don't care.

The makers of this movie should have spent a LOT more time telling us about the rest of Jefferson's life and achievements and, once they presented the possibility of Jefferson's sexual relationship with Sally Hemmings, not spent so much time trying to apologize for it.