Lincoln

It lacked a big deal of rhythm but the revision of the history and, specially, the great performance by Day-Lewis makes it a movie worth watching.

This is a flat out great movie. I first watched it several years ago and enjoyed it, so recently I noticed it on the IMDB streaming service and decided to watch it again. I still think it is great. I guess I had forgotten that it was a Spielberg film, so why wouldn’t it be great? It was many years in the making and was partially based on Doris Goodwin Kearns excellent non-fiction book Team of Rivals. The cast is excellent: Daniel Day-Lewis is really impressive as President Lincoln. Lincoln is believable, human, showing several sides of his personality. He is at times funny, wise, empathetic, coarse, tortured and — well, everything I would expect after reading so much about him over the years. For me, the movie lost a little of its energy when it shifted to the political maneuvers undertaken concerning the obtaining of votes to pass the amendment Lincoln wants to push through Congress, but it is integral to the plot, illustrating that Lincoln was pragmatic and willing to play the game to achieve his goals. Because he narrowed the scope of this Lincoln biopic to the last months of the great president’s life, Spielberg was able to cover a lot of ground, and explore the issue of slavery and the war from numerous perspectives. I do regret watching it through that streaming service. I don’t mind ads, but they popped in randomly, sometimes twenty minutes apart, once five minutes apart, and always right in the middle of scenes. I plan to watch it again, with no commercials. I suggest you do the same.

With the American civil war looking like it might finally be drawing to a close, President Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) is increasingly turning his attention to the passing of the 13th amendment to the constitution. This will not only vindicate the whole point of his fighting the war in the first place, but will enshrine legally the prohibition of any person owning anyone else, or of forcing them into a life of indentured slavery. He is aided by his Secretary of State Seward (David Strathairn) and by his formidable wife Mary (Sally Field) but he is opposed by many in the House of Representatives whom his lobby must convince to support him else it will fail. It’s quite a catch-22 that he finds himself in. Should the war finish quickly, he runs the risk of the southern states kiboshing it altogether even though an early peace would undoubtedly save thousands of lives. His own advisors are split on the issue, indeed some see the bill as excessive or even dangerous should it end up with 4 millions of African Americans getting the vote! It’s a political melting pot that’s only exacerbated by his son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) wanting to enlist and obviously his mother determined this ought not to be permitted to happen! Day-Lewis is on splendid form here as he resists the temptation to merely mimic previous representations of the man and in so during imbues him with quite a degree of characterful conflict. A man of principle whose principles were not so straightforward to apply. Moreover, many of his opponents are equally impassioned in their intransigence with accusations of treachery being levelled angrily, and that perspective is well represented too. There’s a solid cast of support here with an almost unrecognisable James Spader’s Bilbo, Tommy Lee Jones as the scathingly witty Thaddeus Stevens and Jared Harris sparingly appearing as General Grant all adding depth to this chronology. It’s all history, so we know how it all ends, but the top quality production design and the subtly accumulating tension really does offer some semblance of authenticity to the look of the film. It passes two and an half hours surprisingly interestingly and offers us a glimpse of a man in very capable hands.