Four stars. Rating: PG-13, for grim war violence, dramatic intensity and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang
Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, fueled both by Tony Kushner’s
lyrical screenplay and Daniel Day Lewis’ astonishing performance, may be one of
the finest period dramas ever brought to the big screen.
It’s akin to time travel: Our
19th century United States comes to vibrant life, thanks to impeccable work by
production designer Rick Carter (an Oscar winner for Avatar), costume designer Joanna Johnston and, most particularly,
cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Oscars for Schindler’s
List and Saving Private Ryan).
You can practically feel the dust, grit and coal smoke coming off the screen.
Kushner’s dense script demands —
and receives — a massive cast, with scores of speaking parts. The role call is
a Who’s Who of names we remember from history class, and the driving narrative
often unfolds with the confrontational snap of TV’s West Wing.
And yet...
For all its authenticity and
casting excellence, Spielberg’s 150-minute film is long, slow and occasionally
ponderous. It’s also claustrophobic at times, with some dialogue exchanges
seemingly designed for stage presentation (no surprise there, I guess, since
Kushner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who “moonlights” in cinema).
The focus is narrow, as well.
Although based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Kushner
concentrates exclusively on the events of January 1865, with a brief epilogue
in April of that same year. The goal, during this climactic point of Lincoln’s
presidential career: passing the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in
order to abolish slavery. Permanently.
The novel twist, which conflicts
juicily with Lincoln’s generally accepted image: the degree to which he risked
delaying the Civil War, already a four-year conflict that had claimed hundreds
of thousands of young soldiers on both sides, in order to win passage of that
amendment in the House of Representatives.
Kushner has made this conflict
intensely relevant to our own time, depicting a House that is badly fractured
along party lines. Although able to command the undivided loyalty of his own
progressive Republican party, Lincoln also needs a gaggle of conservative
Democratic votes in order to secure passage. At first blush, that isn’t merely
difficult; it’s absolutely impossible, with the Democrats bonded to
inflammatory New York Congressman Fernando Wood (Lee Pace), due to a
gentleman’s equivalent of Grover Norquist’s modern-day “no new taxes” pledge.
In this case, however, Wood’s
stance against Lincoln’s hoped-for amendment garners the support not only of
Southerners who wish to preserve slavery, but also fence-sitters worried that
the likely consequences of successful passage would, in turn, grant former
slaves the right to vote (God forbid).
At first blush, winning support
from anybody in that camp seems
hopeless ... but that’s the thrust of Kushner’s script: the degree to which
Lincoln wheedled, cajoled, horse-traded, bluffed and skirted the very
boundaries of ethical legal behavior, in order to win friends and influence
colleagues.
Day-Lewis brings the man to life
with astonishing clarity, stepping so persuasively into the role that his
performance transcends acting. As was the case with Meryl Streep’s Julia Child
in Julie and Julia, at some point —
not that far into the film — I stopped seeing Day-Lewis, and simply took for
granted that Spielberg somehow had whisked the actual Lincoln into the 21st
century.
Much of this verisimilitude results
from Day-Lewis’ delivery of the countless homespun anecdotes for which Lincoln
was famous, and which he wielded equally to entertain, distract or defuse an
explosive situation. These stories — some amusing, some instructive, some
frankly impenetrable — emerge reflexively, sometimes seemingly at random,
sometimes even to the annoyance of the president’s closest friends and colleagues.
Taken collectively, as this film
progresses, they contribute just as deeply to this complex, multi-layered
portrait of a man quietly juggling multiple crises at every turn. His customary
demeanor is troubled, his smiles a rare but wondrous thing. And yet no matter
how consumed by affairs of state, or the grim tidings of war, Lincoln rarely
misses an opportunity to chat with “ordinary folks,” whether White House
telegraph operators or soldiers pausing briefly between lethal campaigns.
Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is the
ultimate student of human nature: a cunning, keen-eyed observer who matches
personality to situation, and then unerringly pounces with a verbal argument
shaded to reach this person, at this moment. If the actual Lincoln
genuinely possessed such a skill, it must have seemed positively spooky.
On the family front, Lincoln’s
wife, Mary, is played — and not too sympathetically — by Sally Field. Her first
lady is temperamental, emotionally unstable and unexpectedly fragile, at times
given to angry tirades. She has justification, having endured the loss of two
young sons: 3-year-old Edward, in 1850; and 11-year-old William, in 1862. These
details are covered only briefly in this film, however, which has the
unfortunate result of making Field’s Mary seem more of a shrew than seems fair.
Youngest son Tad (Gulliver
McGrath, perhaps remembered from Dark Shadows), no doubt because of Mary’s
unwillingness to let this child out of her sight, is spoiled outrageously:
given free rein of the White House and allowed to behave as he pleases, even to
the point of interrupting important meetings or damaging precious government
documents.
Spielberg gets a subtle, slightly
unnatural performance from McGrath, leaving us to wonder if young Tad is merely
coddled or perhaps emotionally challenged.
Eldest son Robert (Joseph
Gordon-Levitt) drives an additional wedge between his parents, thanks to the
21-year-old Harvard student’s determination to serve his country by enlisting
in the Civil War. Mary is aghast; Abraham understands his son’s desire to “be
part of the historic moment” ... but wishes Robert felt otherwise.
Gordon-Levitt comports himself
acceptably in a fairly bland role; one visit to a military hospital aside, he’s
not given much of a chance to display complex emotion.
Tommy Lee Jones is galvanic as
Pennsylvania’s Thaddeus Stevens, an aging “radical Republican” just as
hell-bent on eradicating slavery, but who lacks Lincoln’s prudence. Jones
memorably displays Stevens’ legendary sarcasm and fiery wit, and his snarky
arguments with Pace’s Fernando Wood are among this film’s high points.
David Strathairn is equally
riveting, in a quieter way, as Secretary of State William Henry Seward. The back-story
here is fascinating — and, alas, Kushner’s script has no time to go into it —
because Seward and Lincoln were adversaries only a few years earlier, when the
former lost the contentious Republican presidential nomination in 1860 to
Lincoln. But once ensconced in Lincoln’s cabinet, Seward became both a friend
and a trusted political ally, not to mention one of the few individuals able
(and allowed) to argue with the president.
Hal Holbrook makes the most of
his role as feisty, powerful Southern politician and Republican reformer
Francis Preston Blair; Walter Goggins (TV’s Justified)
pops up, tellingly, as Ohio Congressman Clay Hawkins. Mild comic relief is
provided by John Hawkes, James Spader and Tim Blake Nelson, cast as the
back-door, glad-handing “gang of three” — Robert W. Latham, W.N. Bilbo and
Richard Schell — who attempt to win the badly needed Democratic votes. (Think
of these three as proto-lobbyists.)
Gloria Reuben (still remembered
from TV’s ER) is graceful, dignified
and courageously forthright as Elizabeth Keckley, the former slave who served
as the White House seamstress and confidante to Mary Todd Lincoln. Keckley, who
deserves her own movie, also became an activist for women, children and freed
slaves.
Although the Civil War most often
remains an off-camera presence, Spielberg briefly indulges in battlefield
footage, once again displaying a flair for the grim, ground-level human warfare
that he depicted so well in Saving
Private Ryan and War Horse.
Spielberg doesn’t exploit these moments, but he also ensures that we appreciate
the ghastly horror of a barbaric conflict that brutally killed men on the
battlefield, and then later took the lives of even more during horrifically
primitive hospital “treatment.”
For the most part, though, I was
reminded throughout of Spielberg’s Amistad,
another dialogue-heavy historical drama that focused on the courtroom confrontation
that resulted from an 1839 mutiny aboard a slave ship bound for the
northeastern coast of the United States. The compelling oratory in that film
was provided by Morgan Freeman, Matthew McConaughey and Anthony Hopkins (the
latter as John Quincy Adams), with a similarly word-rich script from David
Franzoni.
But despite the powerful
performances and historically opulent scenario, that film remains one of
Spielberg’s lesser-known efforts; it simply doesn’t resonate (although I dearly
hope it continues to be shown in high school history classes).
It’s not easy to make a film that
rises and falls solely on the basis of arguments delivered well by a persuasive
cast; the ultimate model probably remains 1957’s 12 Angry Men. By concentrating almost exclusively on the political
duels here, at the expense of often crucial character back-story, we simply
don’t get to know the players in Lincoln’s orbit all that well. Spielberg and
Kushner assemble them for this pivotal moment in history, and expect us to fill
in the necessary blanks.
I’d like to believe that
Day-Lewis’ spellbinding Lincoln and Kushner’s enthralling dialogue will be
enough to hold viewers’ attention.
We shall see.
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