Movie report: Lincoln
Steven
Spielberg deliberately delayed the release of this movie until after the 2012
presidential elections, which was a shrewd decision. If I had seen the movie
before the election, I would have spent 90% of my time wondering who
represented who in modern politics, rather than only 10%.
The
movie “Lincoln” is based on the book "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius
of Abraham Lincoln" by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Lincoln was elected President
out of 4 serious candidates, and had the savvy to enlist some of his adversaries
to help with his administration. Seward, for example, became his Secretary of
State. This kind of political shrewdness appears throughout this movie.
Daniel
Day-Lewis as Lincoln is fascinating. This man at times is as gentle as a woolly
lamb, at other times a steely colossus of power. He cracks low wheezes one
moment, and quotes Shakespeare and the Bible the next. He is tall and ungainly
to the point of farce – you can understand why the famous statue of him in the
Lincoln Memorial has him seated, not standing – yet holds himself like an
Atlas, willingly shouldering the responsibility for the entire world.
The
movie covers the time from January-April 1865, and focuses mainly on Lincoln’s
efforts to get the 13th Amendment – ending slavery – passed. He has
nowhere near the votes necessary for passage, and much of the movie involves
the behind-the-scenes wrangling that goes on to get those votes. There’s also a
subplot about a secret delegation from the Confederates trying to achieve a
negotiated peace. Lincoln has to handle both of these strands carefully. If he
does not take this peace possibility seriously, those who know about it will
withdraw their support for him. However, if it becomes publicly known, there’s
no chance that the Amendment will pass and queer the negotiations. Tricky.
Lincoln
was what I would call a benevolent Machiavelli, a masterful political
strategist, not for his own glory or ambitions, but for good. In this movie,
and I think in real life, he seems to have made it his personal task to
preserve the United States as a single country and to end slavery, which
disgusted him. The movie makes it clear that he would resort to almost any
political shenanigans to achieve his goals. At one point, he lists all the things
that he has done that he knows are either illegal or suspicious. He’s riding
very close to the edge and he knows it.
Lincoln
didn’t surround himself with yes-men, all toeing the party line, as is so
common today. In this movie, everyone argues with Lincoln, and he welcomes it.
You get the feeling he sharpens his mind on the arguments of others. He loves
telling stories and anecdotes, which I think might have been a way for him to
deal with his own shyness among people who regarded him with awe. Not everyone
appreciates his stories, though, and Secretary of War Stanton walks out on him,
complaining, “Not another story!”
Even
the scenes without Lincoln, like the scenes in Congress, are intriguing. First,
it’s all men, because women didn’t even have the right to vote at this time,
never mind hold office. Second, their hairstyles and beards are bizarre. Finally,
the wild curses, insults, and threats of violence that they hurl at each other
continually are astonishing to our modern ears. We think politics is unruly
now. It was a hundred times more so then. Tommy Lee Jones plays the leading abolitionist
in Congress, a crafty old pol with more than a few tricks up his sleeve.
Lincoln
spoke with almost anyone about almost any subject. There’s a scene where he is
discussing Euclid’s axioms of geometry with a telegraph operator. In the course
of this pretty one-sided conversation, he makes a momentous decision about how to
handle the Confederate negotiators. We gradually realize that he is constantly
– constantly – working out political problems in his mind, using what resources
and allies he has, waiting for the right moment, and then doing the right
thing. It’s as if he’s playing chess against not only the Confederates, but against
the opposition party, his own party, and even the ordinary people of the US,
most of whom could not care less whether slavery is abolished.
Lincoln
does not live in a vacuum. He also has to deal with his wife, who was a
handful, by all accounts. Sally Field plays her sympathetically: a mother whose
child Willy died, a wife to a man both beloved and hated. His son Robert
(Joseph Gordon-Levitt, always a pleasure to watch), wants to join the Army,
against Lincoln’s wishes. He indulges his youngest son, letting him ride a
goat-cart through the corridors of the White House.
We
know the ending, of course. The Union is preserved. The slaves are freed. And
Lincoln, infinitely tragically, is killed by Confederate sympathizers.
The
irony is that the South would have fared far better under Lincoln than it did
under his visionless successors. His “malice toward none, charity toward all”
speech was genuine. In the movie, he tells General Grant that he wants no
reprisals against the South after the war, and that if its leaders manage to
sneak off to another country, it’s fine by him. The political genius who
masterminded the death blow to the South’s economy – the freeing of the slaves –
would undoubtedly have had the skill to guide its revival again.
He
never got the chance.
Highly
recommended
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