Movie Chile Review

LINCOLN

By: Bill Kohlhaase
Published online: Monday, November 19, 2012
Appeared in: Pasateimpo

Capsule review

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is a surprisingly small film, considering its subject. With the Civil War as background, it focuses on the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution and what it took, politically, to achieve it. The president deals with the false choice of ending the war and ending slavery, hearty criticism from his political enemies on both sides, and dysfunction in his own family. Daniel Day-Lewis looks and sounds the part of the 16th president, though sometimes his words and the cadences at which they come feel self-conscious. Sally Fields as Mary Todd Lincoln and Tommy Lee Jones as radical abolitionist Thaddeus Jones stand out from an other- wise unremarkable ensemble cast. Interesting, but not epic. Rated PG-13. 149 minutes.

Full Review

Lincoln, drama, rated PG-13, Regal Stadium 14, 2.5 chiles

You’d think a meeting of two of America’s biggest names — Spielberg and Lincoln — would result in something epic and blockbusting. But Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president, is a surprisingly small film, focused on ideas as much as action. It’s based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 biography Team of Rivals, a book that addresses Lincoln’s first election and years as president. Spielberg takes only a slice of Goodwin’s book, focusing on the last months of Lincoln’s life and the passage of the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery. With the Civil War as background, it’s a political thriller without the thrills. There are only a few sweeping scenes of the war, and those concentrate on its horrors. One scene, the distant burning of the port of Wilmington, North Carolina, recalls the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind. What drives Spielberg’s story isn’t the war but the politics and passions behind it. The film’s most relevant message, in light of current events, is transparently suggested: political rancor and arm-twisting, both morally sound and not, are as old as the union itself.

Day-Lewis looks the part of the president, both in size and posture. You can see him slouching under the load of the dissolved country, the deaths incurred in a war he can’t end, and the personal troubles that confront him at home. He moves through a dim world that is shaded by the smoke of pipes and cigars, fireplaces and war. Several of the scenes, frequently framed in dark rooms in front of large, bright windows, offer silhouettes that are right out of a Mathew Brady portrait. To screenwriter Tony Kushner’s credit, this Lincoln is not the saintly man of historical legend. He slaps his adult son, argues vehemently with his wife (played by Sally Fields), and demands his political colleagues recognize his authority as he pounds and points fingers.

Day-Lewis’ voicing of the president is authentic to a fault. Lincoln was more silver-tongued than silver-throated. His voice was “thin” and “high-pitched,” according to Horace White, who reported on Lincoln’s antislavery speech at the Illinois State Fair in 1854. Lincoln’s law partner and biographer William Herndon described Lincoln’s voice as “squeaking” and “piping.” But Hollywood has often made it rich, even thunderous. D.W. Griffith’s 1930 epic Abraham Lincoln — Griffith’s first full-sound production — features Walter Huston voicing a resounding, full-throated Lincoln. In the 1982 television miniseries The Blue and the Gray, Gregory Peck’s Lincoln speaks with resonance and an air of sophistication. (The most melodious Lincoln is Benjamin Walker’s in the recent Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.) Hal Holbrook’s performance as the president in the 1974 television documentary Sandburg’s Lincoln is the exception. Holbrook, who plays the conciliatory Republican Francis Preston Blair in Spielberg’s Lincoln, received hate mail when he made the president sound like “a hick.” In his own defense, Holbrook, something of a Lincoln scholar, was quoted as saying that biographers use five words “over and over again to describe Lincoln’s voice — flat, nasal, high, shrill, and unpleasant.” Day-Lewis, overcoming his English accent, commands these qualities while going full hick. His Lincoln is more Walter Brennan than Walter Huston. But he falls into a certain predictable cadence that makes his backwoods speech all of a sort. The effect is something like Meryl Streep’s Polish accent in Sophie’s Choice. It sometimes gets in the way.

What Lincoln is given to say also piles up on him. When not being profound, he’s being folksy. In the middle of heated negotiations, he starts a speciously relevant story with a laugh, much to the dismay of his cabinet. (The scene recalls one in Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln in which Ulysses S. Grant, well into a bottle, bemoans another story from the president.) He decorates his speech with symbolism, not all of it appropriate. Day-Lewis seems too conscious of the weighty language, something that clashes with the naturalness of his country twang.

Tommy Lee Jones, as the radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, transcends the character acting around him whenever he appears. Wearing an absurd- looking wig, he still manages to be the most sincere character presented. Fields captures the complex and confused character of Mary Todd Lincoln — hungry for social acceptance, anxious to stand up for her man even as she nags him in private. Again, her country drawl, emphasized to the point of irritability, occasionally separates her from her character. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as Robert Todd Lincoln, seems insincere when demanding that his parents allow him to enlist, a home-of-the-brave plot complication that pits privilege against country. A well-disguised Jared Harris (Lane Pryce in Mad Men) is a too-sober Gen. Grant.

The film’s best scenes — other than when Confederate delegates are greeted by black Union soldiers — take place in Congress, where the shouts and name-calling reflect contemporary divisions in their righteous venom. Considering the kind of language bandied about in today’s politics, it doesn’t seem shocking to hear Lincoln called a dictator and worse by those resisting abolition. But there is a reminder — as Spielberg suggests — that such language came at a time when men were in actual, not figurative, chains. There’s also the seemingly quaint notion that compromise in the face of outrage is possible. Anti-abolition Democrats are made to change their minds with the help of favors and, in one slapstick scene, cash.

Spielberg goes for laughs at just the wrong times. In the final-vote scenes, the stuttering uncertainty and repeated dramatic pauses of vote casters undercut the mood and historical importance of the moment. When Stevens’ motivation is revealed, it hardly comes as a shock. The film’s only worthy surprise comes at its end, with the audience expecting the conclusion that every schoolchild knows. This break from the predict- able final scene in an otherwise all too predictable film is a bit of dramatic genius, keeping us from once more witnessing that familiar American climax.