Wait for the DVD to come out, or buy a Lincoln Standee.

Rating: 2/10 (16 November 2012)

Though I went to this film with great hopes of some artistic integrity teamed with a modern lens, I was very disappointed in "Lincoln." It is yet another poorly executed film with all the best intentions that fails to do anything more than add yet another bad time piece to a long line of dull stereotypical portrayals of Lincoln and Washington D.C. in 1865 Civil War America.
All around this film is best seen at home; where the viewer can willfully decide to change the channel, or stop the DVD gladly knowing he paid little more than a dollar at the rental machine as opposed to suffering through a $15 dollar ticket "razzie" nominee. This film is a grotesque platitude to the 2012 genre of politically correct films that does nothing more than prop up a Daniel Day Lewis pretending to be Lincoln - where a cardboard standee of Lincoln would do just fine. For all those people who find this movie gripping or amazing, I can only say that these are the same people that would find paint drying compelling.
A recent movie "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" did far more to add to the collection of time piece films than this awful Spielberg work. In the former vampire film, Lincoln is human and believable with a Mary Todd that is both alive and strikingly relatable. In Sally Fields' portrayal she is "the" faded photograph that is deservedly buried under the annals of more agreeable history. Fields' Todd Lincoln is both an anachronism of bad 1980s housewives, and a questionable recreation of a history you can't but help scratch your head asking, is this really how the 17th First Lady was? The staging of the film was needlessly dark. We all get this is a time piece, but Spielberg decided against better judgment that 1865 was the literal dark ages, as most of the scenes were shadowy juxtaposed against glaring back lighting the flooded out most detail of the sets, the costuming, and the actors themselves. The lighting designer was a willing accomplice as the only bright and lively scene of remark in the film was the white washed facades of a far too bright Capital that architecturally looked no different than the White House. All the manner of costuming also seemed to find inspiration in the clothes rubbish bin that even Fieval from "Fieval Goes West" would be apt to pass on as just outright dull for humanity.
But let's return to Daniel Day Lewis. I had difficulty discerning whether he was portraying Abe Lincoln or fellow modern day actor Jay Baruchel. Lewis' portrayal was forgettable at how unremarkable it was; as I said before, a cardboard standee would have made a better performance because cardboard can't speak. Lewis was so full of himself in his portrayal of Abe Lincoln, his monotonous rehashing of Lincoln quotes was like watching a high school acting troop trying to pull a full blown production of Macbeth, and carried the same acting value.
The rest of the ensemble did little to add/ save the film, and in some cases made it worse. The Lincoln sons were well dull. Lincoln's cohorts weren't portrayals of fellow contemporaries, but came off as - Lincoln turned religious icon - subscribers bowing to a man who couldn't utter a wrong opinion. Todd Lincoln's lady in waiting was questionable and utterly lost in the PC portrayal of the Free African life let alone the slave situation. And the free Africans themselves were relegated to the peanut gallery as mere props. In one scene, an entire telegraph war communications room fell silent so Lewis' Lincoln could wax plastically on the strategy of his legacy. All around, the dynamics of the economic war that was the Civil War was lost in the political correct portrayal that only went so far as to say that "slavery was bad, mmkay" and did nothing to illustrate the situation in the House of the Representatives of the Nation at war up to that time.
Tommy Lee Jones, Hal Holbrook, David Strathairn, Jared Harris, Christopher Boyer, et al. – all great men who struggled to do their best in a film that struggled to even do just okay. And the stereotypical final Ford's Theatre scene is omitted, after Spielberg painstakingly forces the viewer to sit through January to April 1965, and then the viewer isn't even invited into Spielberg's Ford's Theatre. Overall, this film was a sad attempt among many sad attempts to bring to life History. That being said, perhaps Lincoln's true life can't be envisioned without bowing to the religious following Lincoln's legacy has become, where the man can do no evil because he was never human to begin with