great movie, astonishingly "european"

Rating: 9/10 (19 October 2013)

i really liked the film. the grading, the acting, the overall set, the love for detail. i had the slight feeling that Lincoln might have two or three anecdote telling scenes too many, but that is a detail.
i am European and more often than not Americans seem to me to overshoot when it comes to their big national themes. too much heroism, too much pathos and so forth. i found Lincoln did none of these until the very last two shots. i was so impressed by Spielberg not showing the assassination scene and then comes this resurrection in the candle flame. brr. if he had the feeling it needs something "big" to end the film, a silent scene of the funeral would have served way better than this"climax". reminded me of (bad) endings in the forties. it is funny, i think no European film maker would have done that.
but of course doing the film justice requires more than looking at the last two shots. overall i really liked it. especially the concept of putting so much emphasis on the dirty aspects of politics, even when it is for a good cause. the praise of democracy and freedom next to betraying ones' very values. puts a humble note to everything and i for one think it was a good choice to make THIS the theme of the movie and not the liberation from slavery. because for me this WAS the actual theme. you hardly see black folks, you do not really see the tragic reality of slaves. this is - to me - a film about the morals of politics using one of the biggest political characters of all time. wonderful and tasteful choice for the movie, because otherwise the film could easily have drifted into terrible pathos.
Daniel day lewis did something remarkable in my opinion, but only time will tell if i am right: he formed the vivid picture of Lincoln for this and at least the next generation. because it felt like: this IS Lincoln. how more could you praise an actor.
one scene was absolute great film making: when his son followed the two men out of the hospital. we, the audience, expect a bloody mass of a corpse and then it is only ... legs. but that is even more terrifying in a way, yet then it is not, since it is just legs and the people without them actually ... live. this picture of the many legs is indeed in a difficult to describe way more terrifying than a single corpse, no matter how mutilated, since it makes physical injury a mass phenomenon of war and not a more severe, but less likely event. the every day labor of carrying dozens of legs out where they are obviously buried on a routine basis in order to show the shocking and terrifying reality - great, great film making.
overall, as in other films from Spielberg, you see the fight between European taste and American pathos. for the biggest part of the film the first won.