The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
‘Manhunt’ leans on drama in chase for Lincoln’s killer
Abraham Lincoln — perhaps you’ve heard of him? Sixteenth president of the United States, assassinated five days after the end of the Civil War at Ford’s Theatre. John Wilkes Booth. Sic semper tyrannis. Well, I don’t know what they’re teaching in school these days, but I hope none of that is news to anyone. Even so, there’s always more to know. James L. Swanson’s 2006 book “Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer,” which concentrates on the assassination and its aftermath, is one of thousands of deeply researched volumes on the president, his associates, his assassin and the assassin’s associates.
Now, “Manhunt” — with supplementary sources — has been converted into a seven-episode docudrama by Monica Beletsky (“Parenthood,” “Friday Night Lights”), on Apple TV+.
“Manhunt” follows the broad lines and hits many particular points of the assassination and its aftermath, but, like all such translations, it takes liberties. Some of this is for dramatic effect, some to streamline, some to make political points and some of it, surely, is a matter of budget.
Beletsky’s “Manhunt,” though it branches out from Swanson’s focused telling, concentrates on Booth (Anthony Boyle) and his nemesis, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies, from “Outlander” and “The Crown”), a Lincoln skeptic who eventually became the president’s bestie and coordinated the search for his killer.
While Booth’s flight from Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., adheres more or less to the well-known itinerary, the series makes Stanton present at all sorts of places he was not, doing things he never did in order to keep him a dramatically active character. “Have you ever met a problem you could delegate?” asks his wise, patient missus, Ellen (Anne Dudek).
Not surprising, the series, whose directors include Carl Franklin and John Dahl, both of whom specialize in mysteries and thrillers, is most successful when it frames Stanton as a detective — searching rooms, questioning witnesses, interrogating suspects, traveling north to Montreal hunting Confederate spies and riding south in search of Booth.
Menzies, who plays him minus the historical Stanton’s impressive whiskers, the better to appear a 21st-century screen hero, catches his well-documented resolve, seriousness, impatience and impassive imperiousness. He’s a hardboiled brand of Cabinet secretary, with a set jaw and a steely gaze. All he needs is the trenchcoat; he has the gun.
More expressive and expansive is Booth, a popular actor from a family of actors, and a sad-eyed Boyle plays him, as seems to have been the case with the assassins of history, smaller than life but large in his own reckoning.
Booth trades on his charm. “I could fire this (gun) on Broadway in broad daylight and nothing would happen to me,” he says in one of the series’ several messages from the future.
Apple TV+ is advertising “Manhunt” as a “conspiracy thriller” about “one of the bestknown but least understood crimes in history.” That is not strictly true — it doesn’t really function as a thriller, and 16 decades of research, reporting and discussion have left it pretty well understood.
But many of us will hear for the first time of some of these characters and their actions. Even the fact that Lincoln’s killing was only the main component in what was meant to be a three-pronged attack is often
left out of the telling. (I can’t remember it coming up in history class, anyway.)
In addition, there’s been a concerted effort to broaden the pursuit with issues of emancipation and enfranchisement and the effects of slavery, giving screen time to Black characters and causes, rather than allowing this to be merely the story of one white man chasing another. Which seems just.
Most significant is Mary Simms (Lovie Simone), a putupon servant to Dr. Samuel Mudd (Matt Walsh), who set Booth’s broken leg; one of 10 Black people to testify at the conspirators’ trial, Simms is used to illustrate both Mudd’s racism and Booth’s, as well as issues of reconstruction and education. And there is Elizabeth Keckley (Betty Gabriel), a formerly enslaved woman who became dressmaker and confidant to Mary Todd Lincoln (Lili Taylor), helped found the Contraband Relief Association and wrote a memoir which are duly included. Her life could make a miniseries.
The series is well furnished and costumed and moves with pep through its alternating scenes of action and reflection; it is various enough not to get dull. But it’s very much a TV show, with TV beats, made to entertain before it’s made to inform. The problem with any docudrama is that once you know a few things are wrong or fabricated, you begin to question the rest of it. It reminds one not to confuse such representations, filtered through writers and directors and actors, with fact.
But if it spurs you on to further research, so much the better. Learning is good and fun.