Great historical drama with perfect acting, detailed scenery, excellent visual impression and great dialogues

Rating: 8/10 (7 February 2013)

Spielberg worked on this project for ten years and his effort can not be disputed. Just like perfect acting, detailed scenery, excellent visual impression and great dialogues, which were, like complete screenplay, developed for six years by Tony Kushner.
The film deals only with the last few months of Abraham Lincoln's (Daniel Day-Lewis) life, concentrating on January of 1865. when the House of Representatives debated and ultimately voted on 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, banning slavery except as punishment for a crime. Not surprisingly, a lot of historical facts and figures are idealized, and the very issue of the Civil War is simplified just on the question of slavery, although historical inaccuracy is less then it was expected. But the broader historical context is more or less historically accurate, ie about just exactly as most historians believe it happened. How much Americans find this topic important and controversial is shown by changing names of the voters against the 13th Amendment in order to avoid problems for their living descendants. With this in mind it is difficult to understand why the film did not gave time to explanation of such voting and to explanation of reason for Democratic Party to vote against immediate and absolute abolition of slavery just as it did not elaborate reasons for such pursuit of the Republican Party for its abolition.
There's a lot of historical figures in move and it is quite difficult to catch up with everything without any prior knowledge about topic. That's reason why to those simply not interested in history or politics Lincoln could be boring. But Lincoln is actually quite dynamic, action relatively quickly moves from Lincoln's personal life and his relationship with his wife and sons to the relationships within his Cabinet and the House of Representatives, conflicts inside Republican party and peace negotiations with the Confederation. Each segment is almost entirely based on fantastic dialogues, although it is impossible to ignore the excessive pathos inside a big amount of them, but that's not unexpected given the subject matter. There's a lot talking about acting in Lincoln, and that's with reason. Daniel Day-Lewis embodies Lincoln exactly as historical records describe him. Such performance as Day-Lewis's in this movie is rarely seen. The rest of the cast, Sally Fiel (Mary Todd Lincoln), David Strathairom (William Seward), Tommy Lee Jones (Thaddeus Stevens) and Hal Holbrook (Preston Blair) also did outstanding job. James Spader in the role of W.N. Bilbo, is maybe even biggest surprise. In every scene where he appears he draws all the attention to himself.
Steven Spielberg himself has done a great job, this is definitely one of technically best films of his. Dialogue scenes are generally perfectly done with great camera job, he pulled out maximum form actors, every scene is visually fantastic, scenery is maximally authentic, except for a few exceptions, one of which stands out. Wrong flags of the Union! Definitely one of the most mature Spielberg's movies. From the technical part, musical background deserves negative critics. It's insipid, forgetful and sometimes completely missed. The characterization, even of Lincoln, looks kinda hasty and superficial. Actions of some characters sometimes are not explained, sometimes the explanations are banal and sometimes historically incorrect. Although in general such cases aren't big deal but while viewing it's distracting and causes some questions after viewing it.
Lincoln certainly isn't film for everyone. Non-Americans with no interest in history and politics could find it to be slow, boring, uninteresting and pathetic, and that's completely understandable. But technical superiority is hard to dispute and that's proved with target audience being delighted in combination with, probably far from being deservedly, number of nominations and awards.