This Lincoln Is Far Better Than Any Myth

Rating: 9/10 (2 December 2012)

The poet John Godfrey Saxe wrote a few years after the Civil War, "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." This comparison between laws and sausages is no more evident than in Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" an ambitious film about the principal problem facing the president, i.e., what would be the fate of the millions of slaves in the reconstructed Union. Spielberg succeeds in turning the art of negotiating into an entertaining motion picture. Lincoln the master politician and therefore a master in the art of the possible is magnificently recreated by Daniel Day Lewis whose brilliance is once again confirmed in a performance that should receive Oscar consideration. There's an outstanding supporting cast including Sally Field as Mrs. Lincoln, David Strathairn as Secretary Seward, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Robert Lincoln, Hal Holbrook as an influential Republican whose support Lincoln needs and Tommy Lee Jones as Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens. Tony Kushner's adapted screenplay is a masterful imagining of Lincoln the country lawyer who possessed political genius that few understood at the time. It is beautifully photographed by Janusz Kaminski, edited by Michael Kahn and scored by John Williams. A first class production all the way and one that will certainly dispose of any comfortable notions people may have that past generations possessed some great wisdom and courage that far supersedes anything we see in Washington today. As it says in Ecclesiastes, "there is nothing new under the sun".