“This is a true story about two men the world forgot,” reads the text preceding the first issue of Death by Lightning. “One was the 20th President of the United States. The other shot him.” That might read as a bit of an exaggeration, but Garfield is certainly one of a small handful of U.S. presidents who might safely be called forgotten. Elected as a dark horse candidate in 1880, Garfield’s tenure lasted just over six months, the last two of which he spent dying of a gunshot wound that took his life before he reached his 50th birthday. Every history student who’s had to memorize a list of American presidents knows his name. But if you have trouble listing any of his accomplishments, there’s a good reason: He barely had time to get anything done. And though Garfield’s killer, Charles Guiteau, had an eye on becoming a part of history — he bought a pearl-handled pistol for the job because he thought it would look better in a museum — he’s probably come closest to achieving immortality as a character in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins.
Adapted from historian Candice Millard’s 2011 book Destiny of the Republic, the four-part Netflix miniseries is not primarily an attempt to correct that, though it seems likely to have that effect anyway. Created by Mike Makowsky (Bad Education) and directed by Matt Ross (Captain Fantastic), the series divides its time between Garfield (Michael Shannon) and Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen), depicting them as deeply contrasting characters with different ideas of what it meant to leave their mark on the nation. Yet Death by Lightning is just as concerned with the wider world in which both men lived, particularly the chaotic, factionalized (and corrupt) post-Civil War political scene in which an unhinged weirdo like Guiteau didn’t immediately look out of place.
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Briskly paced and tightly focused, the series opens (after a prelude set in 1969) in 1880. While the jailed Guiteau calmly makes his case before a New York parole board after what he describes as “an honest mix-up between tenant and landlord,” Garfield tends to business on his Ohio farm. Though Garfield describes his ambitions as “earthbound” to his wife Lucretia (Betty Gilpin), who’s happy to hear it (even if she doesn’t entirely believe it), he agrees to go to Chicago to nominate Treasury Secretary John Sherman (Alistair Petrie) as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. Neither man yet realizes their lives have been placed on a collision course.
It takes a while for them to come together, however, and Death by Lightning works as a study in contrasts between two different American lives until it does. Shannon plays Garfield as a man who knows more than he says, one who may not actively pursue power but also doesn’t walk away from opportunity. It’s his motives that set him apart from most of those around him. Death by Lightning portrays Garfield as a fundamentally decent man who wants to succeed in spite of the power of the New York-based political machine that has served as the party’s kingmakers, not by cozying up to it. Though savvy enough to make compromises when needed, he’s a champion of genuinely progressive ideas, and Shannon beautifully conveys his innate goodness while also suggesting a sense of duty to keep together a nation whose fracturing he witnessed firsthand during the war.
Shannon is quietly magnetic, yet the series never allows him to be overshadowed by the more colorful characters surrounding him. And though Macfadyen has the showier role, he brings a remarkable amount of subtlety to it. His Guiteau is an obsessive with delusions of grandeur who begins as a diehard Garfield supporter before deciding to kill him for a variety of complicated and sometimes contradictory reasons, Guiteau’s inability to secure a post in a European consulate among them. Macfadyen plays him less as a villain than as a fool blown hither and thither by larger forces. He might be a rogue and a cheat whose innate awkwardness keeps others at distance. (One of the series’ funniest stretches depicts his time as a washout member of the free love-practicing Oneida Community.) But Macfadyen invests Guiteau with an almost childlike vulnerability throughout Death by Lightning that makes him more pitiable than risible.
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Shannon and Macfadyen anchor a cast filled with memorable performances by Bradley Whitford (making yet another return to the White House) as Garfield ally James Blaine and Shea Whigham as Roscoe Conkling, the chief power broker for a patronage system built around the New York Customs house. (The series’ ability to depict blackmail, back-room dealmaking, and even threats of physical harm as elements built into the American political system is one of its greatest strengths.) But it’s Nick Offerman who makes the deepest impression as Chester A. Arthur, who begins the series as Conkling’s most powerful machine lieutenant before finding his loyalties divided after he signs on as Garfield’s vice presidential candidate. Offerman’s Arthur is big, boisterous, profane, frequently intoxicated, and prone to bring his love of sausages into every conversation, but he’s no mere buffoon. His eyes grow misty whenever the subject of his late wife comes up, and Garfield’s not entirely wrong in sensing a conscience flickering beneath the open corruption.
In some respects, Death by Lighting tells an unfinished story. By the series’ conclusion, Garfield’s presidency has started to look like a great what-if, raising questions about what reforms he might have implemented and what he might have accomplished were it not for Guiteau. Yet even if Garfield has been forgotten in part because he had so little time in which to put ideas into practice, Death by Lightning uses the brief span in which he emerged as an unlikely presidential candidate as a fascinating window into his era’s confusion, madness, and missed opportunities, sometimes finding relevant echoes of our own time within it. Not all that’s forgotten should stay that way.
Premieres: All four episodes premiere Thursday, Nov. 6 on Netflix
Who’s in it: Michael Shannon, Matthew Macfadyen, Betty Gilpin, Nick Offerman
Who’s behind it: Mike Makowsky
For fans of: Historical fiction, memorable performances, 19th century sausages
How many episodes we watched: 4 of 4
