Spielberg Secedes From Making Good Movies

Rating: 2/10 (12 February 2013)

This is the most awful movie I've seen in recent memory. How Spielberg can take arguably the most interesting time in American political history with one of the finest actors in modern cinema (Daniel Day-Lewis) and turn it into a 2.5 hour epic slog of pure drivel is completely beyond me. Don't directors generally try to take a seemingly UNINTERESTING TOPIC and make it INTERESTING? Why the opposite tact taken here? I nearly didn't make it through. After making it 10 minutes in (and again at 30 min), I nearly called it a night--it was THAT awful--and I NEVER walk out on movies. Sadly enough, it was curiosity about if anything worthwhile would EVER happen in the movie which drove me to sit through this rubbish pile.
Let me clarify. I love documentaries. I love history. I love long, thought-provoking, detailed movies. I love clever dialogue. This, however, was effective at none of those things. Daniel Day-Lewis in full make-up passed for a beautiful Lincoln, but his mannerisms and demeanor (even his audio I'd have to think) were SO far off! Here, we don't see this dour, weighty Abe Lincoln that history has handed down to us after sorting through a time that added years of emotional baggage to his figure. We see a moaning Abe Lincoln shouting his wife down, horsing around with his kids while his signature legislation is being voted on, BS'ing with his cabinet like they're trying to plan a bake sale, and basically being a giant bully (I wouldn't have been surprised at all for him to yank down his trousers and tell the VP of the Confederacy that his was bigger). I got zero sense of any gravity of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF CASUALTIES and the specter that cast over EVERYTHING going on in 1865. I'm sorry, but this movie stripped Lincoln of anything emotional or recognizable and turned a self-educated, country lawyer turned commander-in-chief into a calculating robot or a jester. There was nothing Lincoln about this. And to what end? To hint that Honest Abe wasn't so honest after all? Well, then sue him for cutting down the cherry tree...OK, sorry for mixing presidents in mid sentence.
As for some of the other things, I'd have to cite terribly inconsistent performances by Sally Field (Mary Todd Lincoln) and Tommy Lee Jones (Rep. Thaddeus Stevens). I don't get the obligatory Mary Lincoln was a crazy scene, when she's shown as nothing but a competent, but grieving mother throughout. And, Jones' depiction of Stevens was a hot gumbo of Scott Baio, Bilbo Baggins, and Gary Senise's Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump all in one. Woo! Joseph Gordon-Levitt absolutely did not need to be in this film at all in his role, save for amassing more "star power." In fact, the ONLY performance I enjoyed throughout was James Spader's W. N. Bilbo. And in fact, the only story thread I found mildly interesting was the wrangling of votes. Turning this many A-List actors into such a muddled and poor pile of claptrap hints at what a gigantic waste of life the direction and screenplay were here.
As for the only things making this somewhat watchable (save for my curiosity about how Spielberg could actually turn out such a dreadful movie and possibly think it didn't suck) included the fact that this was a rare look at the political theater that was really driving the War. Many films opt for depicting life at the battle front (GLORY comes to mind) and it's easy to have a bunch of romance/violence to drive a movie like that forward. So, kudos for ATTEMPTING a Civil War story with NO WAR in it save for the opening scene.
Also, one more redeeming feature was the make-up and costume design relevant to the time period. If this wins an Oscar for that, I wouldn't be surprised. However, even my support of that is qualified due to truly awful and non-1865-vernacular dialogue. I mean, didn't people speak differently back in 1865? They seemed to be speaking in present-day English and interacting with present-day formalities, albeit more dramatically.
And, for Lincoln to go in and introduce himself to a soldier named "Kevin"? WTF? Isn't it more likely he'd find a Horace or a Zeckeriah in that day? Was his domestic servant's name Beyonce too? Maybe his porter's name was will i am or Fallout Boy? Likely not....Poor attention to detail in this regard.
TL;DR: This movie is simply awful. I went in with an open mind, but try as I might to find redeeming qualities, even those qualities are riddled with flaws of their own. This movie was far too long, far too boring, with far too little light shed on the historical aspects of that period. It was a bad movie AND a bad documentary AND a bad play all rolled in one. It did nothing well (ok, costumes were great) and this is shocking when combining the most famous living director, an ensemble cast of Oscar winners, and one of the most interesting periods in American history. In a word, this was shameful.