Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty

Rating: Null/10 (13 February 2013)

In the 1867 Civil War novel Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, a Union captain is assigned at the end of the war, to complete the muster-out rolls cataloging his regiment dead and missing over four years of fighting; to get a sense of the insurmountable task ahead of him, these 'rolls' were indeed supplied after Appomattox by the War Department in the form of sheets that measured a yard square.
In the book, the captain is chosen because he is the only one who has been there since the start and made it through, the only one who has the memory to write the chronicle, jot down the history. Meaning there is the killing and dying, but there is a relative truth to it, a struggle to remember the narrative, one which must have some invented sense in its mechanism.
Spielberg has no notion of this, never had.
It's all about what kind of world you think this is. From his perspective, it is all too clean, clearly-defined, closed instead of open-ended, you can see that in the story he chooses to tell of Lincoln, the people as he shines his light on them. Oh, I'm fine with the facts they put in, they could have put more, could have put less. They could have made a fuss for example of Copperhead activities of the previous summer, to make Democrats look worse. More astutely, they could have said that Lincoln's re-election was at all possible because of costly military victory. Anyway, they have very cleanly managed to convey a complex political situation, the issues at stake.
But again it is a simple-minded effect.
Again with the moral platitudes, again with the flaccid narrative and speechifying, with the good guys on one side, noble in the eye of history if not constitutional law, and bad on the other, malicious fools or at best doddering pawns. It reminds me of the few instances we saw Germans in his Warhorse, flatly inhuman, cruelly whipping horses. Again having the subject be safely self-evident, because what would be those who abolished slavery if not great heroes, villains those who opposed it?
And you can see the same dull unambiguity in his visual iconography of Lincoln—Lincoln as mythic shadow, as weary traveler, Lincoln in the candleflame of legend, popular, pedantic perceptions of the man. How else would you do it?
The one great scene for me is where the passing of the Amendment is given to us as Lincoln waiting in his office, startled by the sudden joyous ringing of bells—there it is, the gap away from ceremony and heated fact, the waiting as gears snap into place, the man alone wondering.
It's just not for me, overall. Because in Spielberg's world it cannot be just an army camp the president is visiting, not just life with its clamor and filth, it has to be so that four soldiers, two of them black, recite to him his Gettysburg Address—no soul here, only the sentimental schooling.
But this is why it troubles to speak of it, because as you watch it, the doubt and inner turmoil is there, the morally fickle North and hostility to negro equality is there, the bartering of half-truths for necessity is there, the radical galvanizing as a byproduct of bloody war.
So I'd ask anyone who likes this to more carefully differentiate solid scholarship in Goodwin's book, the historic legend of the man, some narrative complexity in the script, versus insights in the film and cinematic dimension in the presentation of people whose life is not in any book. Historic persons or not, the life you have to imagine.
The difference is between researched history, and bringing it alive as fiction, which is what all filmmakers do, and why Spielberg so often fails when he tries to portray life. You could get the hats and wardrobe historically right, the correct type of wood in the benches, the words and gaslight, but still make a cartoon.
So this is why I blame Spielberg. Film is a matter of representation, of creating the illusion of a world that moves. So the facts are here, but making it alive is a matter of erudition on the part of the filmmaker, a feel for either people or cinematic devices.
Spielberg has taken some narrative complexity, and as he shouts action and we should have the flow of what is real life to his characters, he can't help but reduce, some truthful moments in Lincoln reduced by juvenile moments elsewhere, the same juvenile handling of people I find in all his other films.
So this is everything he would most like to be thought of as, versus who he can't help but be. It's a silly film.