Masterful cinema -- avoids the predictable cliché

Rating: 10/10 (9 April 2013)

Stephen Spielberg has succeeded at making a movie about Abraham Lincoln without telling us what we already know. It would be easy to turn any project about our 16th President into a one-man show, transforming a fictionalized biopic into a dull documentary in practice. He found away around that by letting others say what Lincoln said. He draws us into the nation's capital and the political process of the time, showing the political order, warts and all. He puts most of the action in the weak light of fireplaces, candles, and gas lamps, giving us a feel that we are back in the time of Abraham Lincoln as no other brightly-lit staging could ever give us.
This is a very human Abraham Lincoln that we see -- and not a stiff granite statue beyond human feeling and doubt. Lincoln had his feelings and his doubts -- and those made him human AND great. It is about one piece of critical legislation, the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in America... and its significance. (The Confederacy would have gladly surrendered so long as it could maintain slavery, which would have been the equivalent of winning the war but losing the peace)
POSSIBLE SPOILER: Stephen Spielberg cleverly avoids leading us into the predictable necessary last event in the life of Abraham Lincoln, the ultimate cliché of history, by having a son at some theater not named after someone named Ford.