He Belongs To The Ages.

Rating: 7/10 (14 November 2013)

It's a more demanding film than you might think. Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States, ruled for a bit more than four years during a period of turmoil unparalleled in American history. And he pulled is through it all until he was cut down by an assassin.
I'm not at all sure he'd be allowed to do it today. I kept thinking, while watching this rather long, dark, complicated movie about Lincoln's struggle to pass the law that would free all the slaves everywhere -- not the weak Emancipation Proclamation but the Constitutional Amendment -- that he may well never have been elected to national office of any kind.
In Mike Nichols' "Primary Colors" John Travolta is running for president and when he falls behind in the polls he dithers over whether his campaign should "go negative". That was 1998. Today the question would never be raised because everything is negative and the "opposition research" is phenomenally effective -- hated by everyone and it works like a charm.
The specialists of today would have made mincemeat of Lincoln's candidacy. They would begin with the big ears, the hint of villainy in his features, his warts. In his youth he experienced what today we would call a major affective disorder, which would unquestionably be called "bipolar." His minimal political experience would be a major stumbling block -- a few years in the state legislature. Everything he ever wrote would be examined for a misplaced comma. He was tall, gangly, had the appearance of a hick, and was unphotogenic. The tale of his sneaking into Washington disguised as a woman would be accepted as fact by many. He'd have a mountain of trouble being elected today.
Yet he was arguably the best president the United States has ever had. Aided by his secretary, he wrote his own speeches and they were marvels of lucidity. The Gettysburgh Address, which isn't his most compelling, has been compared to Pericles' funeral oration. He successfully managed to walk a political tightrope with abolitionists jeering from one side and an outraged audience of Democrats throwing objects at him from the other. It's hard to imagine how he could have done it without going nuts all over again.
Spielberg's movie captures the familiar figure of Lincoln -- the awkwardness, the tall folk stories, the absence of bombast. (At Gettyburgh, the man who preceded Lincoln spoke for more than two hours; Lincoln's address was less than 250 words long.) Daniel Day-Lewis could hardly be better. The torment is there but Day-Lewis keeps a lid on it. Everyone else is professional, though the movie belongs to Lincoln.
It was a curious decision to focus the story on the struggle to pass the fourteenth amendment. It's not usually thought of as an illustrious moment, only as a footnote to the winning of the Civil War. But the writers dig into the issue and it's a little like turning over a rock and seeing slimy little white things wriggling for cover. Votes in favor of passage were happily bought by Lincoln's administration. If there's a lame duck Democrat you can buy his vote by promising him that he will be appointed postmaster somewhere. It's all taken for granted.
Nothing here about Lincoln's more celebrated and arguable actions. He used a flimsy excuse to throw the politicians of Baltimore into jail without habeus corpus. He was under Confederate fire on the outskirts of the capitol. Nothing about his delegatory sins. The astonishing disappointment of some of his appointments -- MacClellan (twice), Burnside, and the rest -- don't come up. His first cabinet, he filled idealistically with his political rivals, with the expected results -- chaos.
Moreover, the movie is in some ways confusing and dull. Not the fault of either the performers or the director but the script is a mish-mash of personalities and conflict that are hard to keep straight. And almost all of it seems to take place in sepulchral interiors. Lincoln was as good as they come but the movie isn't.
In the end, concentrating on the fourteenth amendment may have been a wise choice. It encompassed most of the awesome and terrifying dynamics that surrounded Lincoln during his entire period in office. And I'd like to shake Spielberg's hand for sparing us from still another trite staging of the assassination at Ford's theater.
It's in some ways a challenging movie. The kids will wonder what all the fuss was about. They may even say, "So THAT'S who Lincoln was." But overall it's quite a spectacle and maybe an object history lesson.