Freedom's a thing that has no ending

Rating: 10/10 (25 November 2012)

In his two-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, Carl Sandburg wrote, "A tree is best measured when it's down." Since his assassination in 1865 by the pro-Confederate actor John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln has become almost a mythological figure, an icon of American idealism. When he died and his body was carried on a funeral train through seven states along a 1,662-mile route, thirty million people lined the railroad tracks waiting for the "lonesome train on a lonesome track with seven coaches painted black." In the cities where the train stopped, 1.5 million people viewed the fallen President in his coffin, yet today many of his attributes as a real person have been obscured by the legend.
Stephen Spielberg, in his masterly Lincoln, attempts to redirect us to the man and the qualities of his leadership that carried the nation through a devastating civil war, the man that Karl Marx called "one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good." Written by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America, Munich), using Doris Kearns Goodwin's book "Team of Rivals" as a source along with dialogue and speeches from the historical record, the Lincoln that emerges is not a statuesque hero but a man capable of folksy and often scatological humor as well as great oratory and spiritual depth, a down-to-earth man whose stories drove home his points with consummate skill.
As the sad-eyed, stoop-shouldered President with the soft speech but steely resolve, Daniel Day-Lewis turns in a masterful performance capturing Lincoln's speech, mannerisms, and mood swings with a rare authenticity, even though any performance can only give a hint of the mystery of his true greatness. The film is also dotted with colorful characters portrayed by a superb ensemble cast including Tommie Lee Jones as the passionate abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, Sally Field as a sympathetic Mary Todd Lincoln, David Strathairn as Lincoln's Secretary of State, William Seward, Hal Holbrook as Preston Blair, a Conservative Republican, and Joseph-Gordon Levitt as Lincoln's son Robert whose desire to enlist in the Union army is strongly opposed by his mother, still healing from the death of eleven-year old Willie three years ago.
Lincoln opens on a battlefield where the carnage is horrific. The President sits on a crate at an Army camp and talks to the soldiers who voice their grievances to him about pay inequality. As Lincoln offers to consider their requests, both white and black soldiers recite from memory the famous Gettysburg Address which celebrates the "brave men, living or dead, who struggled here," and calls for "a new birth of freedom," a phrase that, in that context, can only have meant the freedom of black people from slavery. We do not see a public speech until much later when Lewis movingly delivers Lincoln's Second Inaugural address in which Lincoln specifically identifies the clash over slavery as the most important cause of the war, and invokes the name of God in indicting America's offenses against black people.
Rather than revisit Lincoln's traditional biography, Spielberg zeroes in on the period from January to April 1865, the last four months of his life, focusing on the lesser known story of the 1864 fight to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, a struggle that came shortly after Lincoln and the Republicans had won a substantial victory in the 1864 elections. Though Spielberg has no hesitation about Lincoln's commitment to end slavery, his own struggle with racism during his lifetime is hinted at in his conversation with Mary Todd Lincoln's servant, Elizabeth Keckley (Gloria Reuben).
Lincoln is correctly worried that the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 will be seen as a temporary war measure and that it might be reversed by the courts after peace was achieved. He knows how crucial it is to pass an amendment outlawing slavery before a peace deal might compromise and allow the South to maintain their "way of life." Lincoln's advisers plead with him not to press for a vote which they believe will be defeated and jeopardize the chances to end the war. The political fight for passage shows a different side of his personality, the practical but forceful politician who is willing to take risks and is not above wheeling and dealing, yet whose policies are always grounded in principle.
Spielberg suggests that the President used three lobbyists played by James Spader, John Hawkes and Tim Blake Nelson, and was not above buying votes but the verdict is out. Harvard Professor David Herbert Donald says that "If Lincoln used other means of persuading congressman to vote for the Thirteenth Amendment, his actions were not recorded. Conclusions about the President's role rested on gossip and later recollections of those of Thaddeus Stevens." Whatever the case (and the truth may have been stretched in giving the House news about an approaching Confederate Peace delegation), the result worked for the good of humanity.
Lincoln is not only a paean to a great man but a tribute to the kind of honest adult cinema that used to be commonplace but is now a rarity. It is a passionate work about a towering figure who left an enduring legacy of freedom, but one whose legacy will not be complete until no one is ever again deprived of their civil rights. As blacklisted author Millard Lampell's Cantata The Lonesome Train tells us, "The slaves were free; the war was won, but the fight for freedom was just begun. Freedom's a thing that has no ending. It needs to be cared for; it needs defending. A great long job for many hands, carrying freedom 'cross the land." Spielberg's Lincoln may help us to renew that journey with increased determination.