Fact is stranger than fiction in Netflix’s ‘Death by Lightning’
This review contains mild spoilers for “Death by Lightning.”
There is a point in Netflix’s “Death by Lightning” when Vice President Chester A. Arthur (Nick Offerman) — a beery, sausage-loving scoundrel — tries to quit. President James Garfield (Michael Shannon) refuses to accept his resignation, even though Arthur openly insulted him in the press. “I feel it my duty to explain to you that you really ought to fire me. I’m a truly bad vice president,” Arthur says in an amusing burst of sincerity, but Garfield genially asks that he give the job another go. “I don’t see your game in this!” Arthur responds, baffled, in one of Offerman’s many standout moments playing the dissipated, corrupt and recently widowed VP. “For some reason, it eludes me!”
I felt much the same way during my initial viewing of creator Mike Makowsky’s star-studded historical dramedy about James Garfield, our 20th president, and Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen), the man who shot him, now streaming on Netflix. “Death by Lightning” is a pleasantly weird show that cheerfully upends much that we’ve come to expect from presidential biopics.
Not just because of its pointedly anachronistic dialogue, with 19th-century characters tossing off phrases like “I’m a lefty” and “I’ll keep you posted” in lavish period dress. Or the casual glee with which the show mines comedy out of tragic circumstances (while dutifully amplifying viewers’ awareness of a president few Americans could name).
These are jarring juxtapositions, certainly, symptomatic of the show’s stylized mash-up of high and low registers (and its penchant for scrambling contemporary and period-appropriate behaviors in an effort to hook modern audiences). That’s a lot of hybridity for a four-part series, so it’s unsurprising that the show fails to produce a coherent and satisfying take on whatever was going on with Guiteau. Or a robust account of what Garfield’s death meant for the country.
Many modern-day histories include winks and nods to the present; not so here. The show wears its authority so lightly it barely seems to have any at all, and the effect is enjoyably disorienting. “Death by Lightning” feels less like responsible history than a damn good yarn, and I mean that in the best way: The events it recounts are so bizarre that I finally gave up Googling whether something could possibly have happened as scripted and read the book on which the series is based instead — Candice Millard’s “Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President.” (Spoiler: Yes, most of it happened.)
The title comes from an 1880 letter Garfield wrote responding to concerns that he was in danger: “Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning,” he replied, and the show channels that approach to matters of historical causation, relishing coincidences as much as planning or strategy. Fate is not a factor here. Rather than plead any specific man’s historical importance, or insist on cause and effect, it propels itself forward through vibes.
Macfadyen, the series’ co-protagonist, feels as if he hasn’t quite escaped the shadow cast by “Succession”: He plays Guiteau as a wide-eyed, Gilded Age Tom Wambsgans who never acquired enough capital to land his Shiv. Garfield’s shooter is ingratiating, pretentious, and sporadically idealistic; plagued by delusions of grandeur, he keeps slipping down society’s rungs. Like Wambsgans, he kisses up to men with power in hopes a little will trickle down if he debases himself enough.
Macfadyen is funny and infuriating and manipulative and sincere by turns, expertly deploying an implausible mix of abjection and hubris that echoes the show’s own heterodox recipe. Guiteau’s hunger for greatness inspires repulsion and sympathy in equal measure, and his misadventures — including a sexless stint at the Oneida free love colony — drive much of the series’ comedy.
Shannon, by contrast, plays Garfield so marvelously straight that you can’t help but be devastated by his eventual demise; rarely has the actor made his trademark gaze this wise and soft. “There’s no game,” he says quietly in the scene above, putting his arm on Arthur’s. Eccentric, intellectual and a straight shooter, Garfield emerges as a gifted, albeit reluctant, leader whose immunity to dirty politics and indifference to the Republican Party machine equipped him to take it all down.
Garfield’s presidency lasted only a few months, so “Death by Lightning” confines itself to four episodes. The show burns through its source material quickly, beginning with Garfield building a table from scratch at his farm in Mentor, Ohio, while his daughter gently ribs him for his many failed domestic projects. Scenes of family life are startlingly modern, with the kids pleading for pancakes and Garfield playfully taking orders. Garfield’s marriage to Lucretia, a.k.a Crete (Betty Gilpin, brilliant as ever) is scripted as a partnership of equals — which, in fairness, it appears to have been, notwithstanding a month-long affair Garfield guiltily confessed to in an earlier stage of the marriage.
The show’s other major players are introduced at the tumultuous 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago, which resulted in Garfield’s nomination. These include James Blaine (Bradley Whitford), Garfield’s future secretary of state, who shares his disgust at the state of the party, and Blaine’s enemy Roscoe Conkling (Shea Whigham), the party boss from New York, who spearheaded the movement to nominate Ulysses S. Grant to a third term. Conkling wielded considerable power in the Republican Party through bribes, favors and control of the New York Customs House. Finally, there’s Arthur, Conkling’s minion — and his longtime ally and enforcer as a former collector for the Port of New York.
Matt Ross directed all four episodes, and the performances are uniformly excellent, even if they sometimes seem to be operating in different genres. Offerman is a particular delight as the story’s sinner turned saint, and Richard Rankin does a great Alexander Graham Bell. The unorthodox score works well (Ramin Djawadi does it again).
The writing is great fun, but just as uneven as the show’s overall tone. Some omissions are puzzling; there is little acknowledgment, for instance, that Arthur and Conkling actually lived together during this period. Other changes make the series more moralistic than it generally seems to want to be: The choice to have Guiteau’s sister Franny (Paula Malcomson) abandon him at the end, for instance, seems heavy-handed. It’s also a missed opportunity given that her husband, Guiteau’s brother-in-law George Scoville — a patent lawyer played by Ben Miles in the series and portrayed as despising him — actually ended up having to defend him in court. (I long for a court scene in which Macfadyen’s Guiteau berates Miles’ Scoville for ineffective counsel.)
A few plot developments feel overengineered, including one in which a fictional meeting between Guiteau and Arthur inspires Arthur to coax Conkling to donate to Garfield’s campaign, whereas others don’t make much narrative sense, even in the space of a scene.
But here’s the surprising thing: The show is better when it resists the impulse to manufacture linchpins that force the plot into coherence. History is packed with Weird Things That Happened, and “Death by Lightning” works best when it abandons historical (or even moral) interpretations and shakes off tedious or half-true parallels to roll around in the fun. The fact that this is not a major story in the annals of American history gives it space to simply be a rollicking story set in American history, unburdened by the pressure to speak to present-day concerns. And on this front, it undoubtedly succeeds.
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Death by Lightning (four episodes) is available for streaming on Netflix.