30 years ago: ‘Jefferson in Paris’ was Merchant and Ivory’s underwhelming tale of the third president

Released in 1995, the historical costume drama starred Nick Nolte as Jefferson and was something of a movie out of time.

For all the talk of movies that could and could not “be made today,” Jefferson in Paris is one of those movies that would look very, very different had it been made, say, 15 or 20 years later than it was.

In reality, Jefferson in Paris was released in March of 1995, 30 years ago next week. It arrived as part of the Merchant Ivory company’s seemingly endless series of costume dramas throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, only this time applying the formula to both an American founding father and the nation’s troubling racial history. It was the first time Merchant Ivory, which mostly produced literary adaptations, made a portrait of a historical figure.

And no, Jefferson in Paris does not, in any way, soft-pedal that Jefferson was a slave owner, that he fathered multiple children by his slave Sally Hemings, or the contradiction between Jefferson’s authorship of the Declaration of Independence and his having owned slaves.

That’s all there in the movie — there’s much talk about whether or not Hemings and her brother will be freed, and we even see James Earl Jones, in a much later framing device, as Jefferson and Hemings’ son — and in the way it might not have been had the movie been made, say, 30 or 40 years earlier. But I get the sense a version of Jefferson in Paris made more recently would have finessed things a bit better.

The film is set throughout the 1780s, after the American Revolution but before the adoption of the Constitution, when Jefferson was serving as ambassador to France. He also carries on an affair with a married woman (mid-’90s Italian movie siren Greta Scacchi, also of The Player and Presumed Innocent), although he’s clear that he had promised his late wife not to marry again.

If you haven’t seen the Merchant Ivory documentary from last year, called simply Merchant Ivory, you certainly should, although Jefferson in Paris is mentioned only in brief passing, as part of a brief chapter on the company’s mid-‘90s move towards studio pictures that were more expensive but less successful.