Spielberg's Lincoln

There could be many ways of putting Abraham Lincoln on film, but most of them would be wrong.  The subject is a tough one: the heft of it threatens almost from the start to make the project collapse.  A light touch is essential.  Steven Spielberg, then, is a perilous choice for this occasion.  Spielberg's films have in the past sometimes given way under their own weight.  To wit: Saving Private Ryan, a film too full of cheap patriotism, sentimentality, and melodrama -- an action film that aspires to do too great things.  Fortunately, Spielberg's Lincoln is not Saving Private Ryan.  Lincoln, instead, displays the subtlety necessary to do justice to its subject.  It is unequivocally a great film.

Part of what makes the film work is that it wisely chooses to focus not on the big picture but on a central event of the Lincoln presidency: the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the one that Constitutionally forbade slavery, in 1865.  The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was a daring rhetorical act, but it held no legal staying power; Lincoln knew that he had to get this amendment through in order for his previous actions to hold any meaning -- and in order for the war to truly settle the matter of the South's "peculiar institution" once and for all. 

It helps that Spielberg has Daniel Day-Lewis on hand to play the title character.  Day-Lewis's Lincoln has a kind of stately presence that one senses is more accountable to his height than to any sense of self-importance, but it's a quality of which Lincoln seems to have taken advantage.  Lincoln lumbers through each scene like a minor giant, but this bearing seems natural and unaffected.  Lincoln's voice is more a train-whistle whine than a deep chugging baritone that we expect, but the effect is perhaps all the better.  (As Day-Lewis noted in an interview for the New York Times, his operating assumption was that such a voice carried better in a crowd.)  We sense that here is a man who took everyone by surprise: the country lawyer who proved a savant, who made his way in a political milieu that more typically favored the cultural elites.  Day-Lewis's Lincoln has a certain peculiar grace that is charming.  He grins through minor turmoils but we never doubt that he feels the weight of things very heavily.  He's homespun and plainspoken without being aw-shucks cornpone.  In other words, he seems like a possible and plausible human being.

Day-Lewis's performance would have gone nowhere, however, if it weren't for Tony Kushner's script, which did something very few films of this type manage to accomplish: it gives us dialogue that is actually convincingly of the film's own historical time and not of our own. The script is almost entirely free of the modern cliches that populate so many other historical films.  Each character has his or her own lively and distinct idiom, with Lincoln's being the most distinctive of all, though that of Thaddeus Stephens (Tommy Lee Jones) is certainly comparable in vibrancy.  What Kushner captures best in Lincoln's language is the wide-ranging dynamics of which he was capable, the shifting from a natural low register to a soaringly high register as situation and circumstance demand.  Lincoln is one moment folksy, plainspoken, humorous, capable even of some lesser vulgarities, and in the next moment he is deeply sincere, projecting a thoughtfulness that is profound.  The core essence of Lincoln's character is, to my mind, captured in a conversation between the President and the staff men in the telegraph room, a conversation that hinges on a chance discussion of Euclid's geometry and which proves, in this narrative, to be a defining moment, one that more or less saves the day.  This speech act is, needless to say, not one of Lincoln's famous moments, but it succeeds because it captures Lincoln's best quality -- his thoughtfulness -- in a convincing way.  As for the more famous words, they bookend the film.  The Gettysburg Address is recited here in tandem by a group of soldiers in the early moments of the film, which to my mind is the proper way to present it.  If we started with Lincoln himself mouthing the words, the film would never have been able to recover.  After a restrained and modest touch -- one displaying the lightness, the deftness sometimes missing from the director's work -- Spielberg deserves the chance to present the final lines of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address -- perhaps the President's best speech -- in their full resplendent glory near the film's close.

Spielberg's chiaroscuro is impressive. It's hard to think of anyone since Orson Welles who used light and shadow so magisterially.  There's an impressive balance of levity and gravity here.  In all, the film works.