
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 16, 1995                   TAG: 9504180049
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: D-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

AMERICAN ABROAD

THERE'S fiction and there's fact, and then there's fiction masquerading as fact. Which is what's wrong with films like Oliver Stone's "JFK," about the assassination of President Kennedy - and now, apparently, James Ivory's "Jefferson in Paris," about Jefferson's years in Europe as ambassador to France for the new American republic.

However powerful those movies may be as art, they are bogus to the extent that they (1) fiddle with the facts to juice up the story yet (2) claim to be accurate depictions of the historical record.

Fictionalized history is nothing new for Hollywood. But with, say, a "Gone WIth the Wind," no pretense was made of documentary or quasidocumentary accuracy. It was a movie made from a novel, about clearly fictional characters, and it did not ask to be judged as biography or history.

Some degree of poetic license is, of course, necessary and desirable in movies. How, otherwise, could they re-create dialogue? Yet people need to know what's fiction and what's not.

Is it important that this movie opens with Jefferson's using his device for duplicating a letter as he was writing it, even though he in fact didn't come up with the invention until long after his years in Paris? Well, yes - when you consider historians' complaints, reported recently by The Christian Science Monitor, that this is only one of several pieces of deliberate chronology-jumbling for cinematic purposes.

Or that the movie implies that Jefferson was barely able to speak French, when the record shows that he was fluent in the language? Yes, again. Reportedly done to camouflage actor Nick Nolte's inability to master French pronunciation, the alteration bears on a serious point: the sophistication of Jefferson's - and the young American nation's - international diplomacy.

Or that the movie accepts as fact the speculation that Jefferson fathered children by his slave Sally Hemings? The idea isn't new to the moviemakers; it was advanced by a professional historian, the late Fawn Brodie, in the 1970s. Reading the same evidence, however, most other scholars find Brodie's thesis unproved at best and manifestly wrong at worst. The smart money is on a Jefferson nephew as Hemings' lover.

For moviemakers and historians alike, getting a good picture of Jefferson the man, as opposed to Jefferson the statesman, is a problem. The record of his thoughts and deeds on public matters is ample; the record pertaining to his private life, slim. Any honest look must conform to such facts as are available, and be candid about the speculative nature of the rest. For that, don't rely on Hollywood.

by CNB