Daniel Day-Lewis' Not-So-Honest Abe

Rating: 9/10 (25 November 2012)

The fact of the matter is: LINCOLN works. This is a-typical Spielberg. Oh sure, there's plenty of the light and shadow magic that is his hallmark (one feels that Lincoln's striking profile was somehow destined to be filmed in a Spielberg silhouette). But Spielberg found it necessary to build the film around the characters and not the other way around. And so we have an admittedly languorous film, Spielberg explaining that if a character needed to breathe, he allowed him to breathe.
Few filmmakers trust the audience to, not only have the attention span for real-life exchanges, but the appetite for it. Like Lincoln, Spielberg takes the slippery risk of actually trusting the audience's intellect. He does not pander; he takes his time, and Tony Kushner's adaptation of Doris Goodwin's excellent "Team of Rivals" makes full use of 19th century oratorical speech which, once our modern ears adjust, is deliciously engrossing.
Anyone expecting a Civil War version of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan needs to be forewarned: This film is not a vehicle for gratuitous violence. There is, in fact, very little war footage and it is entirely a political procedural drama. LINCOLN is certainly beautifully shot by Spielberg's ace-in-the-hole Janusz Kaminski: artfully lit to emphasize the earthy, swarthy browns and blues that saturated the palette of 1860s America, as well as the bright freshness of the Washington capitol in the 1860s. It is also, in fact, an intelligent character study, penned by Tony Kushner it is an actor's dream of a film; its power lying completely in performance.
Day-Lewis melts away the marble and sweeps away the cobwebs of history. This is a living, breathing, and very imperfect human being. Daniel Day Lewis' Abraham Lincoln is a patient man, but has a volatile temper. He's a devoted father, but not without daddy issues of his own. He wants to love his wife, but can't love her the way she needs him to. He is a moral man, but  he's also a politician Honest Abe is indeed, morally pure— but not exactly honest.
And we, the audience, see and hear him as he almost certainly was in Spielberg's LINCOLN. A man of awkward build and height, his 6 foot 4 frame, strikingly tall in the mid-19th century, surely seemed even more imposing with his gaunt frame and 8-inch high stovepipe hat. This gives him an off-balance, wobbly gait. He also listens. And he speaks. Oh boy, does he ever speak. In a high, reedy voice, cracked with age and beaten by years of 'melancholy,' that unsettles the audience. It has none of the deep, baritone register we've been conditioned to believe was Lincoln's. Perhaps due to the simple fact that Daniel Day-Lewis is an Englishman and therefore Lincoln's mythology is not a part of his cultural genetic makeup as it is ours, afforded him the courage to take the risk and debunk the myth of Lincoln's voice and manner. Day-Lewis' Lincoln has the voice of a man weary with the weight of the country resting on his slumped shoulders.
Day-Lewis is, of course, one of the finest actors of this, or any, generation. And just as Lincoln was the moral glue that held the country together, Day-Lewis is the film's anchor. Oh sure, other performances in the film are more exciting and amusing (Tommy Lee Jones WILL get an Oscar nod for this for his acerbic abolitionist. James Spader as a whiskey loving lobbyist won't, but should). But Day-Lewis' embodiment of Lincoln is what gives this film heart. Even when he is off-screen, his formidable shadow is still present, making it possible for some of the film's best scenes to take place without him. Congress and the lobbyists steal the show. But what makes them tick is the fact of Lincoln.
LINCOLN covers a mere slice of Lincoln's history: his fight to pass the 13th Amendment through Congress, a feat that would end slavery in the United States and, more to Lincoln's point, the Civil War. It's an Alice Through The Looking Glass world in which the Democrats are, as Tommy Lee Jones' Thaddeus Stephens says, a bastardized version of Thomas Jefferson's party and are hell-bent against the passing of the Amendment, vehement against the concept of race equality. Lincoln's Republican Party, by contrast, is home to the liberals: the "radical" freedom fighters determined to abolish slavery. Not only is the President in a race against time to end the slavery issue and thereby save the Union, he has a highly unstable wife to deal with, a difficult relationship with his eldest son, a cabinet that doesn't trust him, and a House of Representatives that disrespects him.
This Lincoln is a knee-slapping spinner of bawdy tall tales (I never thought I'd hear the words "George Washington", "outhouse", and "shit" in the same sentence), and is neither ashamed nor dismissive of his humble backwoods roots. This professed simplicity belies his exceptional intelligence, a perfect and powerful political tool as he consistently takes his opponents by angry surprise with a royal flush of logic. Not only is Lincoln the right man for the job, he is the only man for the job. Perhaps this is why we love this man: Heroes make the impossible possible in the most impossible of circumstances. And the best heroes, the ones that last, are psychologically complex and certainly far from guileless. And to this extent, Lincoln is a hero.
LINCOLN is not Spielberg's best film. It is not even the best film of the year. And it is far from perfect– biopics rarely are. But it succeeds where it needs to, namely, in making us care deeply about this most extraordinary man, and even more about his cause. The fact of both which make it possible for us to be who we are today.
In Spielberg's hands, the legend is preserved and is carried forward, for the ages.