Daniel Day-Lewis and Steven Spielberg Combine to Make Movie Magic.

Rating: 9/10 (13 March 2013)

"Lincoln", directed by Steven Spielberg, was nominated for twelve Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Tommy Lee Jones) and Best Supporting Actress (Sally Field); it won two, Best Actor, Daniel Day-Lewis and Best Production Design, Rick Carter. A film so weighed down by awards glory has to stand tall to meet expectations. It does so magnificently. Steven Spielberg is arguably one of the most assured and consistently great directors in the modern cinematic landscape; his career stretching back to the beginning of the nineteen-seventies has produced classic after classic, from adventure in "Raider's of the Lost Ark" (1981) to the Holocaust drama "Schindler's List" (1993). His extraordinary versatility serves him well again, transforming a potentially dry historical drama of interest only to Americans into a riveting examination of democracy, of the inherent compromise and double-dealing to pass what was then a controversial and contested bill.
Yet Spielberg is not alone: Tony Kushner has excelled himself in writing one of the most intelligent, literate scripts in years, providing fantastic dialogue and characters for Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, David Strathairn and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. All these actors clearly relish the opportunity to be part of this incisive drama and give superlative performances. However, Daniel Day-Lewis gives not only the performance of the year, but one of the best of the past decade. From his historically accurate whiny, high-pitched voice to his bowed walk, wearied by years of war, grown old before his time, this isn't a matter of impersonation: Day-Lewis exhibits all the best virtues of method acting; there is no trace of him as an actor. We have a real performance and an in-depth examination of a few crucial weeks and months that changed the history of a nation.
It's the moral assessment by Lincoln as to what to do and crucially, how to do it, whether the ends justify the means, that helps make it universal in appeal. Spielberg looks lucidly into the events and spares nothing. No glamorisation, no white-washing: Lincoln, an all-American icon, is distraught, indecisive and watches as his wife is mentally affected at the prospect of losing a son to a dying war and the way public and private lives intertwine seamlessly.
Only the ending, showing the aftermath of his assassination by John Wilkes Booth (an event that avoids cliché by not showing it) seems unnecessary. It had found the perfect ending ten minutes before, as Lincoln sets off to see the play where he would meet his killer. It's a rare misstep made more jarring by the fact that the film has so few of them.
However, it is not enough to stop this film from being a superb union between Kushner, Spielberg and Day-Lewis who create one of the great movies of this still young decade.