You need a lot of patience with this movie

Rating: 7/10 (24 June 2013)

They didn't have electric lighting in the 1860s, and there are quite a few scenes in "Lincoln" where you become well aware of the fact. There's no question that the movie strives to be faithful to the time and the specific historical events. Lincoln's voice is portrayed as somewhat high-pitched because by all accounts that is what it was like. His tendency to drift off into goofy or even scatological stories that may or may not be amusing to all around him seems also to be quite accurate. And of course the screenplay, based on a distinguished recent work of history, goes into great detail about the manipulations and machinations involved in the politicking over the proposed 13th Amendment.
The familiar saying about laws and sausages--that it's better if you don't see either as they are being made--applies here. The politicking and scheming and patronage payoffs are tiresome. Let's face it, that's what legislation is still like today. The movie has nothing new to say about such matters except--and it's a big exception--the one most involved in this sausage making is Lincoln himself. He certainly doesn't look like a John Ford folk hero here, nor a Raymond Massey demigod.
And that's perhaps the main theme of "Lincoln"--that Lincoln was heroic precisely because in part he was a down and dirty man just like the rest of us. You need patience to see that out of this lowdown mess emerges a constitutional amendment that remains a guarantor of human freedom. Little by little you see the grandeur of Lincoln's vision--combined with a sly and cunning sense of how to make that vision reality, a lawyer's understanding that the Emancipation Proclamation would never be enough, and a political realist's understanding of the importance of timing. The man who tells goofy stories and is afraid to anger his wife turns out to be a genius and a true hero, a national treasure.
That said, the movie does try one's patience. There's a lot of speechifying, a lot of dim rooms, too little open space. It's a literally dark, claustrophobic picture.