'Lincoln' Review: Brilliant Performances Help Redeem Bloated & Messy Script (NY Film Fesival)

Three years before he became president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln accepted the Illinois Republican Party’s senatorial nomination by preaching that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln was, of course, referring to the wound of slavery, which severed the nation at the waist before he successfully abolished it in the months before his assassination (possibly by vampires). The truth of his words was realized in blood during the most violent conflict in American history, and it has proven to be one of the enduring lessons of our country’s most agreeably heroized presidency. With that in mind, it’s hard to forgive Steven Spielberg’s portrait of that same presidency’s final days for being so frustratingly conflicted about the story it wants to tell. Spielberg’s smallest film since Always, Lincoln paints our sixteenth president as a single-minded man isolated by the incalculable burden of his role in this nation’s future, but Tony Kushner’s script seems uncomfortable with such an intimate scale, shoehorning in a mess of subplots and needless digressions that work to distract the movie from doing what it does best.

Lincoln ultimately compromises as a musty (if occasionally rousing) legal drama about the passing of the 13th Amendment -- erudite but bloated, the film fails to make the most of its impeccable cast, wasting a Daniel Day-Lewis performance that’s so hypnotizing and human it could be confused for a resurrection.

Like the vast majority of biopics that are worth a damn, Lincoln restrains itself to covering a small sliver of its subject’s life, beginning in January of 1865 and ending (long after it should) in the days following Lincoln’s death that April. Opening with blasts of cannon fire that don’t portend the chatty courtroom saga to come, Spielberg’s film introduces us to the president at the height of his approval and celebrity -- in fact, the first scene of the film finds Lukas Haas and that little Leo DiCaprio clone from Chronicle reciting the Gettysburg Address back to Lincoln like kids today might spontaneously quote from a movie when they happen across their favorite actor.

He’s Abraham Lincoln: Vote Hunter. The pivotal event of Spielberg’s film is the pivotal event of Lincoln’s life: The passage of the 13th Amendment, which provided freedom to all slaves nationwide. Like a high-stakes episode of The West Wing, Lincoln’s primary dramatic engine is the process by which the president’s underlings shake out the requisite number of votes required to push a bill through Congress. Every time that the movie threatens to become a true character study, it cuts away to amusing but redundant asides in which the likes of John Hawkes and James Spader (both crushing it, as per usual) try to root out key swing votes. These bits eventually pay off with the film’s most crowd-pleasing moments, but the juice just ain’t worth the squeeze.

Before long, it becomes clear that, while everything orbits around the title character, Lincoln is essentially an ensemble piece. For every thread that earns its keep -- Tommy Lee Jones essentially plays himself as Thaddeus Stevens, but he does so to brilliant effect -- there’s one that distracts from the film’s righteous moral velocity. Joseph Gordon-Levitt puts on his game face (complete with a killer mustache) to appear as Lincoln’s eldest son, but his odiously dull itch to enlist as a soldier recalls that obnoxious kid from War of the Worlds, and his character is abruptly abandoned at the end of the second act in order to streamline the third.

But whenever things become so scattered or prosaic that it feels like you’re watching an ill-begotten sequel to Amistad, Daniel Day-Lewis shows up to set the ship straight. To the surprise of exactly no one, Day-Lewis inhabits the guy like he’s already spent 52 years in his shriveled skin. Oscar season’s favorite chameleon, Day-Lewis absolutely disappears beneath that famous hat and beard -- his Lincoln is immediately more of a human than an icon, a man like any other save for his virtue and his task. He’s wry and contemplative, a windbag prone to stories that were longer than his speeches. He desperately struggles to be an available father for his youngest boy, but is also prone to indignantly raging at his wife (Sally Field as Mary Todd), who’s still reeling from the death of their son, William.

Day-Lewis wrests Lincoln from our nascent American mythology, reanimating him as a person of flesh, blood and inconceivable responsibility. It’s a restrained performance, so deeply resistant to theatrics that the slow dolly shots Spielberg keeps slinging across the actors face seem incongruously overcooked in how they capture a man of such simple sentiment. Through Day-Lewis, we see how Lincoln’s tremendous foresight allowed him to appreciate the true extent to which the 13th Amendment would shape millions of lives for generations to come, and we feel how Lincoln was tormented by the blood on his hands and the future on his mind. Nodding to John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, Day-Lewis never forgets the president’s background as a lawyer, and some of the character’s most fascinating moments find him subverting the word of the law in order to accomplish an absolute good. These bits resound with echoes of Oskar Schindler, and Spielberg shows that he still has a rare gift for exploring the moral equivalency behind history’s most profound heroics.

Even when Lincoln is offscreen, his presence is still felt. His long shadow -- made literal by Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography -- looms over the scenes of Congress, in which Spielberg’s direction is quietly elegant and evocative, abandoning the kinetic movements and layers of focus that bear his signature in favor of a more traditional style that recalls the likes of Otto Preminger. As a result, Lincoln sometimes feels like the best movie ever made for A&E (John Williams’ tossed off score only adds to this impression). While the occasional exterior shots accomplish little beyond screaming “Look! We have scale!,” Rick Carter’s stellar production design is a veritable time machine, and Kaminski’s lighting illustrates the subtler side of his genius, Spielberg’s regular DP opting for an under-lit and natural look that refuses to cheat Congress of their oppressive ambivalence; streams of white light blast through every window, helping the impression that Congress is ruling from on high, condemning the pettiest among them for their vain theatrics while the future of the world hangs in the balance.

But none of those moments in the Congress, as rousing as they are, feel revelatory in the slightest. Kushner’s script has no trouble eking suspense from known fact (we may have a black president, but you’ll still be biting your nails as the cast announces their votes on the 13th Amendment), but Spielberg’s smallest movie in nearly 30 years is still too big. Had the film buckled down on Lincoln, it could have been a remarkable study of a good man who gamed the system in order to better the world, but the film’s outsized vision makes it feel like a problematically narrow portrait of a nation fighting for the ideals upon which it was founded.

Lincoln’s kaleidoscopic approach invites you to question why there are so few roles for African-Americans, or why Thaddeus Steven’s wife is used as a punchline. The movie has the opportunity to be precise, and instead it tries to be definitive. As a result, Lincoln is a stirring history lesson, sure to be a new favorite film for substitute teachers across the country, but a film so determined to help us remember our history can’t afford to be so easily forgotten.

Note: This review is based on an unfinished version of the film that screened at the New York Film Festival. It officially arrives in theaters on November 9.

It's 2012. I can't believe you're defending slavery.

Do you boys still wear the white robe and the pointy hats?

Like most cowards, you enjoy the luxury of hindsight and cherry-picked quotations.

If you can find that Lincoln disdained blacks before 1860, certainly you can find his quotes and writings from after 1860-- when it actually mattered. His views evolved, and he had to deal with something that you clearly don't: reality.

It's immediately obvious to anyone looking at Lincoln that, whatever he said before the war, he thought differently once he was in it. And he was in it before he was sworn in.

Lincoln didn’t give a damn about slaves and only made slavery an issue when he wanted a “moral” reason to murder Southerners.

You're saying he hated blacks, and wanted to murder southerners? Really? Seems to me that if Lincoln hated blacks he'd have let the south go.

But the logical outcome of the war was the freeing of slaves; he pursued the war with the intention of winning. The question of 'southern independence' is moot, because 'the south' was inextricably linked to slavery. Lincoln was defending the Constitution for all men. That's something that you boys in the robes don't mention much in your defense of the south: the Constitution. Or slavery, you always leave out slavery. Wonder why?

I'll further point out (against your claim that Lincoln was looking to murder southerners) that his wife was from Kentucky, a southern state. Her brothers fought in the Confederate Army (a number were killed); one brother served the CSA as a surgeon. Even a cursory reading of history is enough to disprove your idiotic assertions. Lincoln did not want war, and he did not relish the death of anyone, north or south.

And never forget his bogus Emancipation didn’t free the first slave.

Your idea is that he shouldn't have issued it?

Lincoln made the moral case that slavery was wrong, and it was issued it became impossible to separate slavery from the argument. For a historical corollary as to how this type of leadership works, go look up the Venona Papers; read about the effect that Reagan calling the Soviet Union an 'Evil Empire' had upon the Soviet army generals. Then come back and argue your point.

Lincoln was a lying, two-bit railroad lawyer who was the doing the bidding of the Northern Industrial millionares who controlled him.

He got elected President twice, and is admired the world over as an icon of freedom. He answered to his conscience, not the newspaper or industrialists.

Tell me: what have you got?

_{_{Didn't think so.}}

_{_{Small man, anyone?}}

“His views evolved”

50 year old men’s view DON’T “evolve”. He was a white supremist who thought he was superior to blacks. He wanted to ship them back Africa. He was also a socialist who destroyed the form of government our Founding Fathers fought and died for. Karl Marx called him his favorite American. Lincoln remains the only president who caused more American casualties in four years than all of our foreign enemies have in two centuries. He is also the only president who has left mass graves of Americans in his wake on American soil. The only thing tragic about his assassination, is that it did not occur four and half years and 750,000 deaths sooner.

He was a white supremist who thought he was superior to blacks.

Yet he waged the war that ended slavery, and for that was shot in the back of the head by a coward from your vaunted south.

He wanted to ship them back Africa.

This was not an idea orginal to Lincoln; it was a popular solution in the years leading up to the war. Go read some newspapers from the era.

He was also a socialist

Do you know the meaning of the word? Socialists don't grant freedom, they take it away.

who destroyed the form of government our Founding Fathers fought and died for

Nope. He defended the Constitution of the United States against a domestic enemy who thought it laudable to hold men in chains and confiscate the product of their labor. Answer me this: where in the Constitution does it grant one man the right to own another as property? That's where your whole story falls apart; you can't defend the south because to do so is to defend men owning each other.

There's a better definition of socialism: economic slavery.

If you want to complain about Presidents being socialists-- or worse, confiscating the product of a man's labor-- you need look no further than the White House today; that's where you should direct your energy.

You clearly don't understand history, or the definitions of political systems.

Karl Marx called him his favorite American

If you read Marx's letter to Lincoln in 1864, Marx is encouraging Lincoln in the fight against slavery. I agree with Marx on that point. Do you?

Lincoln remains the only president who caused more American casualties in four years than all of our foreign enemies have in two centuries.

The cost of eliminating slavery was indeed high.

Why did your heroes in the south fight so hard, and kill so many, in defending their 'rights', when the central right they were defending was the unconstitutional ownership of one man, by another?

The blood is on the south, not Lincoln.

He is also the only president who has left mass graves of Americans in his wake on American soil.

Again, the blame for those graves belongs with the south.

The only thing tragic about his assassination, is that it did not occur four and half years and 750,000 deaths sooner.

So said an anonymous troll on the internet, 150 years after the fact, in defense of slavery.

Your forefathers created a real mess, didn't they?

And yet, you have the insolence to complain about the man to whom history handed the thankless task of cleaning that mess? What kind of a man are you?

0 for 5, Grand Dragon.

If you can't up your game, we're going to have to call this off, because you're not very intelligent.

http://carnageandculture.blogspot.com/2007/02/clyde-wilson-lincoln-fable-part-iii.html

According to Just War Theory, which in general rests upon assumptions that war should not be a tool of politics but be defensive action, damage inflicted by the aggressor must be lasting, grave, and certain, and all other means of response must be shown to be inadequate. Does the surrender of Fort Sumter justify Lincoln’s call for troops to invade the South under this perspective? When vast opportunities for negotiation and peaceful settlement were available and underway and had the support of large numbers of influential citizens in every part of the country? Just War theory requires that war not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be fought and have a reasonable prospect of success. Does the vast destruction of life and property and constitutional freedoms justify Lincoln’s war under this view? The prospects for success? Success was acheived only by a previously inconceivable vastness of mobilization, casualties, and debt, and, even so, was long in doubt. Let’s not even mention Lincoln’s violations of Just War theory in systematically terrorizing the noncombatant population of the South.

And then, we have the Great Emancipator. He took a raft trip down to New Orleans as a young man and had his eyes opened to slavery, which he vowed to strike against. There is no evidence for this Road-to-Damascus experience. What we do know is that Lincoln shared in the property of his wife’s slaveholding family and on at least two occasions was counsel for slaveholders seeking return of runaways. It seems clear that he used the N-word all his life and that he was a white supremacist like all other Midwesterners of the time (and later). The only options he offered to emancipated blacks were to be sent out of the country or to “root hog or die,” in any case to stay out of the North. In answer to these facts, the apologists have imagined a Lincoln who wanted racial equality but had to adjust his public words in order to advance a recalcitrant people as far as they were able along the path of righteousness. Or else, we are told, he mysteriously “evolved” into an egalitarian, perhaps using the same magic by which the Supreme Court “evolves” the Constitution................

Hey ohioan, here’s your opportunity to impress us with your intellectual consistency.

Read through these posts - at 26 it’s not that taxing - and then share with NKP_Vet the same concerns about slandering other people’s heroes, by indulging in nasty banter, and distracting others from the campaign to replace Obama.

Do you condemn or condone NKP_Vets statements that Lincoln was just another white supremacist? That he was simply a lying, two-bit railroad lawyer? that he holds primary responsibility for 750K American lives? That he conducted “mass genocide” on the south?

Do you agree with the following statement: “The only thing tragic about his assassination, is that it did not occur four and half years and 750,000 deaths sooner.”

Bonus point: Are these comments less egregious than being happy that lee is dead; equal in egregiousness to being happy that lee is dead; or more egregious than being happy that lee is dead?

Thanks

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