The photography in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” often paints our country’s 16th President in stylized obscurity, the beautiful backlighting casting Honest Abe in shadows of his own history. It’s a movie that fully embraces our American virtues, and yet for all we thought we knew about Lincoln suggests there is more to the man than the icon.
The Lincoln we see here is not the towering man with the deep, resounding voice that can carry across a battlefield. This is a Lincoln suffering from nightmares, giving piggyback rides to his youngest son, wrapping himself in an old blanket, telling cute stories with his soothing, high-pitched whisper of a voice and furrowing his brow as he deals with the impasse of war and the effort to abolish slavery. This is perhaps not the man we imagined in preschool but the man that was and the man who still portrayed an immense presence.
When screenwriter Tony Kushner (“Munich,” “Angels in America”) approached Spielberg with an adaptation of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography, it was a sprawling 500-page script on Lincoln’s life. Spielberg focuses in on the short period between April of 1864 and January 1865 when the Civil War is coming to a close, the Senate has already approved the 13th Constitutional Amendment and the Democrats in the House threaten to vote it down.
Lincoln’s battle is a powerful paradox. End the war and readmit the Confederacy and they will certainly block the law to end slavery. Fail to pursue peace and the swing votes in Congress may turn against him. And yet if slavery is abolished and done so before fighting resumes in the spring, the war is over, as the South has nothing more to fight for. Their fight to get it passed is a war of words, not of worlds, and “Lincoln” is approached as a stately performance piece, not a war epic.
It is more theatrical than cinematic, but Spielberg does the job of emblazoning these big ideas onto the silver screen. For all its talking, “Lincoln” is a movie of action. Their Congress gets more done in two and half hours than ours did in two and a half years, and the scenes of debate and voting are invigorating moments of politics, racism, boastfulness and insight.
And because all these historical figures are in their own way larger than life, Spielberg has assembled a cast that is just as impressive. Daniel Day-Lewis is remarkable as Lincoln. At times, Lincoln is calm and without words for all the harried politicians in his cabinet. Day-Lewis seems almost detached from the scene, but he slowly builds and shows why Lincoln was so arresting. Sometimes the end to his story is a punch line, like about how a man loathed the image of George Washington, and at others he unleashes philosophical truths of equality and common sense with the greatest of ease. Unlike some Day-Lewis performances, he melds into this role and never proclaims he is acting. Sometimes he finds the best notes when he’s just being a father, child on his knee in a rocking chair and revealing his deep humanity.
Then there’s Sally Field as Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd, a frazzled, fiery woman of great hidden power. Field above all is the one who sets the film’s stakes, heaping the burden of passing the amendment with the threat of the death of their oldest son (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and her admitting herself to a mental institution. Watch Field as she greets guests at their White House party, holding up a long line to speak more candidly with some of the key Congressmen. She appears at once absent minded and in full control, figuratively shaking hands with a powerful grip but really not exerting any pressure at all.
But best of all is perhaps Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, the Republican representative from Pennsylvania. In one pivotal Congressional scene, he goes against his belief that all men are literally created equal and proclaims that all men should be equal under the law, regardless of race or, as he says to his vocal Democratic opponent, character. The beauty of Jones’s performance is that although his dialogue is eloquent and verbose language of the times, Jones can still deliver such lines with the same blunt force he does in all of his roles.
Spielberg and Kushner have put a great deal of effort into recreating every period detail as historically accurate. We get a movie of remarkable production design in stunningly authentic and old-fashioned clarity. But “Lincoln” does still feel like a movie for the modern day. He jokingly asks, “Since when has the Republican Party unanimously supported anything,” and draws startling parallels between Obama and Lincoln by observing that many Democrats viewed Lincoln as something of a tyrant.
By ending on its bittersweet note, it leaves us with the idea that some ideas and possibilities must be withheld now to achieve prosperity in the future. There may be some wet eyes as the visage of Lincoln burns powerfully in a gas lamp during a closing shot.
“Lincoln” may not always be the rousingly patriotic portrait of Lincoln we imagined, but it’s the American vision we deserve.
4 stars