Spielberg Knows Exactly What He Wants to Display

Rating: 7/10 (22 June 2018)

There are some weird reviews of the movie that I come across every now and then claiming that the movie actually portrays Lincoln as a saint and it would be better to present him with his mistakes and such. These sights are clearly presented with claims disproving themselves with that kind of perspective as Spielberg tries to demonstrate the exact opposite of that view. It may not be the best effort, but it is, in sharp contrast with this kind of reviews, an effort to portray a man, rather than a saint or a hero without a humane presentation.
By portraying such a man, Spielberg takes a great risk of course. But, he does it with the only way that a director should lay his endeavors, he presents a small part of a grand narrative. That is the key to the movie. People complain about the movie's title or the presentation of a short period of Lincoln's lifetime, they have no idea about cinema in my opinion. Recently, I have watched one of the adaptations of "Germinal" by Emile Zola, such a grand narrative for me. Claude Berri tried to adapt the novel in that 1993 version. That was one of the worst adaptations I think, just because of the movie's incomprehensible endeavor to recapitulate the whole novel in nearly three hours. The only thing that could be recollected from the movie as a good feature was its language, which was French. If, by any chance, Claude Berri tried to recapture the last part of the novel, last ten days, even ten hours of three main characters of the novel when they are stuck in the mine after the accident, it might well be a nicely presented exhibition without the haste and tumultuousness of a very long novel narration in three hours which seemed to lose the influence of the story stored in a format that which we call a book, a novel. Why I gave that example, just to remind people that grand narratives equal grand lifetimes or biographies and Spielberg knows it. He also knows that 13th Amendment was the most important point to depict on screen about Abraham Lincoln. Some other director may think that it was not, it was some other thing from his earlier times worth to demonstrate, and that director may create a great demonstration as well, it is not my point. The point is that a director should capture a moment, a thing to present from a narrative rather than recapitulating all of it, and Spielberg does that.
Other comments about Lincoln's stance against slavery, if it was fake or not what we see in the movie, are also centered around certain pieces of information about Lincoln's ideas, from some letters or deduced from political actions; however, they miss the point. Lincoln's notions are altering throughout the time just like all of the United States, he does not take a stance like an absolute abolitionist but one cannot claim that he does not actually care about slavery, he only uses that subject for his war policies. That is, to put it mildly, narrow-mindedness. Lincoln, as Eric Foner puts it, is part of a spectrum of thinking on slavery in that era believing that it would be a long process to get rid of slavery, but step by step he is, in some sense, evolving. Spielberg tries to portray that transition or evolution period with vague dialogues of Lincoln, he never takes a strong stance like Thaddeus Stevens, but it is a rather discursive evolution of a person with attitudes of a mediocre development.