The moving trick of making an icon human

Rating: 8/10 (17 November 2012)

For over 50 years, Raymond Massey (ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS - 1940) has been the public image of the ideal and idealized Lincoln, but whatever the year end awards may think of Daniel Day Lewis' performance in Stephen Spielberg's LINCOLN, I think this may be the standard for the next fifty years: not of an idealized Lincoln, but a warmly believable, *human* Lincoln achieving his final and perhaps greatest political feat in the final months of his life.
We are not given a perfect film to showcase Lewis' magnificent performance; to be honest, Spielberg has not found a satisfying emotional opening (an unconvincing close up of hand to hand combat) OR finish to his film following his triumph in the House Chamber and White House and the well finessed finale to Lincoln's life that we all know (and finding a fresh way to tell that tale, with young Tad in the seat at Grover's Theatre that his parents might have occupied, is in itself a minor achievement), David Strathairn's solid Secretary of State Seward is never allowed to show the warm literate relationship which made these two former rivals for the Republican nomination for President the envy of their Cabinet colleagues and Tad, the President's youngest son, is played with more an eye to the loving parent's image than the physically challenged (a cleft palate and lisp) historical reality, but the performances of the entire cast - Sally Field's magnificently layered Mary Todd Lincoln ("Molly") and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Robert Lincoln in an impassioned scene with his father outside the army surgery especially - more than make up for any failure of detail.
VISUALLY, the detail is astounding, from the look of a still unpaved Washington and pre-electrified White House to Secretary of War Stanton's whiskers, the viewer is drawn into the historical reality of the last chapter or three of Doris Kearns Goodwin's magnificent "Team of Rivals" (the whole book follows Lincoln from the beginning of his drive for national office), and delineates Lincoln's drive to get the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, formally and finally abolishing slavery in the United States, passed on to the States shortly after his re-election and before the new Congress could be seated in the spring. It explains even more clearly than Kearns Goodwin had why the timing of the passage was so important to Lincoln and the country.
Warner Brothers' 1972 transfer of the Broadway musical 1776, like the stage version before it, showed that with the proper skill and passion, it is possible to build great suspense around a historical political event the audience consciously KNOWS to have happened but may not know the drama which surrounded it originally - so it might be easy to slough off the second time the feat is achieved, but the achievement is far from easy and the result here is in many ways even more impressive than in the musical because there are no side issues to distract the debate over...well, less potent side issues. There, the issue was independence and the side issue was slavery. Here, the issue is slavery - as Ben Franklin had prophesied, a question for a later generation - and the side issue a broader equality - a question which WE know would take more than a hundred additional years to address.
The film's requisite set pieces bridging the main body of the film and the end - the burning of Richmond and Lee's surrender - are somewhat perfunctory, but ultimately satisfying. It's a fair mark of how well the film held its audience when a dozen of the full house when I saw it stayed for the full "crawl" of the credits at the end.
Over all, the film will leave you feeling a new respect and almost affectionate connection with our 16th President - one entirely appropriate at a time when we have just re-elected a president who so much of the country (admittedly in a FAR less divisive peacetime) has developed almost as warm, personal feelings about. It's fascinating to see Lincoln trying to hold his Republican Party together as the Radicals of HIS day (who were extreme LIBERALS) start to overwhelm the moderates from the perspective of a 21st century where the Radical Right has started to lose control of the party in the face of a president Lincoln made possible and who is, in fact, more like a Moderate Republican than a traditional Democrat.
If the film can capitalize on its own quality and the fortuitous timing, my fondest wish is that much the same team could make ANOTHER Lincoln film from earlier chapters of "Team Of Rivals" focusing on Lincoln's drive for the presidency itself! That one should be a corker too, and a great legacy to a broader understanding and knowledge of our essential common history.