The importance of being earnest

Rating: 8/10 (19 February 2013)

Much as he did in AMISTAD and SCHINDLER'S LIST, Steven Spielberg gives us a history lesson. This is an earnest film that requires serious concentration from the audience, given that it mostly consists of temperature-raising debate in Congress and arm-twisting meetings in the Lincoln White House. There are some scenes of the Civil War raging beyond Washington which are as visceral as the Normandy landings at the beginning of PRIVATE RYAN. Spielberg is equally brilliant at the broad canvas and the close portrait. The cinematography in Lincoln is almost painterly, like one of the Dutch masters: dimly lit rooms filled with dingily dressed people. I was reminded of the scenes inside Don Vito's house in the original GODFATHER.
The movie belongs, as the shower of awards is proving, to Daniel Day- Lewis. This is the most convincing portrayal of a historical figure since Ben Kingsley's Gandhi. When Lincoln shouts a reminder that the role of President invests him with "awesome powers", you feel that Day- Lewis himself is invested with awesome powers. His make-up is a tad overdone: there were moments when his beard and deeply furrowed brow gave him the look of a Klingon. As Thaddeus Stevens and Mary Todd Lincoln, Tommy Lee Jones and Sally Field give career-best performances. Costumes and sets give the whole movie the look of an authentic window into the past.
If this is an accurate account of how the Thirteenth Amendment came to be passed, then the abolition of slavery was almost a fluke. We are only showed the House debate, not the Senate (which had already passed the amendment), but very few of the parliamentarians seem to have acted out of conscience or from principle; the waverers (of whom they were many) were won over by bullying or bribery (jobs for the boys).
However narrowly the Thirteenth was passed, US democracy was stretched in 1865 to encompass all its citizens. This is a fine, a noble, movie about one of the key moments in America's history.