Talkie, one-dimensional, over simplified, but great performances!

Rating: 5/10 (12 February 2013)

The film was originally pitched as showing Lincoln, warts and all, rather than as an untouchable icon. That's what I wanted to see. I think Lincoln was a great President, but there's no way around it, he was still a man of his time, and no president is without blemish. Slavery was not just a moral issue, it was an economic issue. It'd be like making a movie 100 years from now about bin Laden and the whole reason we went to war with him was because he was anti-woman rights. I mean, he is, but that's just a fraction of the picture.
The Civil War was NOT just about the morality of slavery, as this film mostly shows. Lincoln himself, to his dying day, believed that the two cultures could never truly live together, and he had thought about "transporting" all the slaves back to Africa. He made racist jokes and for the majority of his term as president (arguably all of it) his main goal was to keep the country together, not to establish a moral precedent on how to handle slavery and racism. The 13th amendment was a way to try and avoid the same conflict sprouting up again, since the various "compromises" over the years had all horribly failed. Oh, that's another thing, this film shouldn't be called Lincoln, it should be called The 13th Amendment. We only see the very end of Lincoln's presidency, let alone anything before he was president, and the film has very little going on psychologically like the truly great biopics such as Lawrence of Arabia or even Raging Bull.
Lincoln also did some very controversial things. He suspended habeas corpus, which is mentioned once in the film by one of the clear villains of the film and never brought up again. That's vital to understanding how he approached the civil war. People were arrested without trial for saying negative things about the country. Do the ends justify the means? It's a good question to ask, and it'd make for a good film. Lincoln seemed to want to ignore this as a film and mostly focus on the moral dilemma of slavery, which is an aspect of history, but not the whole truth, especially since the film begins with slavery as a moral debate and doesn't grow into it.
Admittedly, the first 15 minutes of Lincoln were the best in my mind (including his dream - which to me worked better as an idea for being President than the 13th amendment specifically, in that when you're a leader, things are moving forward whether you want them to or not). I'm not saying any of this to disparage Lincoln, it's to show what the conflicts of that era were. As I said, imagine a film made 100 years from now that is all about bin Laden's stance on women, or America's stance on global warming as if that were the single biggest thing on people's minds during this recession. It's an issue, but it's just one aspect of a much bigger picture. However while my problems with the film were related to the narrative, I thought all the performances were incredible, especially Daniel Day-Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones, who has the best and most historically accurate and complex character in the film. Thaddeus Stevens really did see slavery as a moral issue, and he was a big influence on what happened in the 1860s.
Of course, there was another hundred brutal and oppressive years after the civil war before the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Brutality and segregation lived strong in a very institutionalized manner and all the extreme racists loved Lincoln because, until our recent era, he was not seen as the anti-racism president but as the president who kept America together. And that's still, ultimately, his true legacy, and because of his strengths as president now a lot of credit is given to him that really should be saved for other figures who are more obscure but who did the real legwork for equality both before and after the civil war.
It is disappointing to me that Americans have gobbled this film up so happily, because it really is a lie in many ways, and it's also not that entertaining of a film, nor does it question the very nature of truth like, say, David Fincher's Zodiac.