Worthy, but ultimately dull and draggy, portrait of a great American icon.

Rating: 5/10 (24 February 2014)

President Lincoln has two things in his mind and on his plate. Bringing to an end the costly and bloody civil war and find a way to pass the 13th Amendment: In broad effect, to end all slavery on American soil.
It seems churlish to summate any great (in the sense of important or historically relevant) statesman in a paragraph. Like trying to summate the impact of The Beatles in such a couple of lines. A film has to do something similar in under two and a bit hours. A bit more room for doubt and complexity and ambiguity, but essentially not much.
Besides, very few films can survive or be a success where the central character isn't a hero. Or at least a flawed hero. This is a film of selected facts and even some bizarre fictions.
(Why are the details of the final deciding vote wrong?)
Here we have a very modern Lincoln who sees blacks as equals and is moved to tears by the sight of men in chains. Or at least he says he was. Strange that he later wanted to export freed slaves to other lands where their conditions would be similar. Maybe it was the actual seeing it that he objected to?
A film is allowed to have an opinion that isn't mine. To take as fact what may be only interpretation or biography. That is fair enough, but to carry a morality film the central character has to be seen as - at heart - fair minded. A man who would be the right thing, even at personal cost. Reading his own words doesn't lend me to think that. Indeed he seemed to believe that the future America would become be formed as part of an apartheid system. Mixed marriages to be outlawed.
(And maybe they would have been if Lincoln had lived long enough!)
Politicians have stayed the basically the same since the dawn of time. Two faced, corrupt, self-serving and deceitful. They understand only two thing: Themselves and money. Using this information most things are possible now and then. There isn't any subtlety in this story, the politicians were simply bribed for their votes. So much for democracy or even an interesting storyline.
The best thing here is Daniel Day-Lewis. Indeed he saves the film from being unwatchable. What fantastic acting it must be to keep a straight face while a grunting front-line soldier recites the Gettysburg Address from memory! Doesn't matter how many years you work on a script (Tony Kushner), doesn't mean you won't come up with cripplingly bad scenes like this!
After a modestly interesting opening - including some basic battle scenes - we are in the smokey and half-lit rooms where corrupt politicians and lobbyists do their dirty work. To be frank I was soon bored with it all. But it just goes on-and-on in the gloom.
In a crass finish the final vote is played like a big game with close-ups of faces and the gnashing of teeth. All we need is an excitable commentator on the PA. We (those who don't generally live in caves) know what is going to happen so there isn't even any intrigue or tension.
Spielberg has made some great movies and some great flops, but I'd rather sit through one his flops (1941?) again then sit through this all over again.