Lincoln

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD (kind of... you know, if you fell asleep in history class, in which case you're probably not going to see the movie, anyway)

Lincoln was never going to match the expectations. The best it could hope for was to pull a King's Speech and not be quite as Oscar-baity as the trailers indicated. Spielberg accomplishes that. As a director, he's always excelled at taking in a lot of ideas, processing them down, and parceling them out without the audience gagging or getting bored. That sounds like a back-handed compliment, but the man deserves all the credit in the world for being able to create palatable dishes out of material girthy enough to choke an elephant. And even when that becomes a bit much, he can at least retain the verisimilitude, keeping us locked in the room of his choosing without suffocating us. In this case: Washington, DC, in early 1865. Lincoln does not suffer because of its director.

The acting is worthy of the material and then some. Just sorting through the central characters: Daniel Day-Lewis achieves a new method acting miracle by actually growing two inches for the lead role. Tommy Lee Jones' performance as Thaddeus Stevens steals the show through the noted advantage of having been right (his unrestrained distaste for pro-slavery pols is satisfying). Sally Field wisely does not go full tilt with Mary Todd and opts for frustratingly selfish (full Mary Todd crazy would've been immediately dismissed as campy and outlandish). And would it now be too weird to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt play John Wilkes Booth? Because I really don't think that guy's up for enough hypothetical roles. So the cast isn't the problem.

The issue, I'm tempted to say, is with the script. And that's not fair because the script is perfectly fine--the story is solid and the dialogue is generally engaging--but the trouble is in the bevy of source material that the script must draw upon. There is no way to tell the story of the Lincoln Administration through the passing of the 13th Amendment and do either any justice (Lincoln believes it can do both). We were never going to get a fifteen-hour epic spoon-feeding us every tidbit from Team of Rivals, so it's probably unfair to judge the movie based on what it decides to cut when cutting anything was near-criminal. Now watch while I judge it on that metric, anyway.

Criticisms of the film as a depiction of white superheroes saving blacks from a state those same superheroes had imposed are well-grounded. Black people in Lincoln are the object in a passive sentence. It's not as if President Lincoln wouldn't have come in to contact with freemen of the District. I mean, I don't expect a heartfelt speech from Lincoln's barber, but maybe a token appearance from Frederick Douglass? No. Something must give in historical dramas (which trend toward a bloated carriage, anyway), and so all we get is Mary Todd's confidant/dressmaker and Stevens' housemaid/lover, who only shows up after all is said and done. It's not that this is a particularly offensive omission (although it kind of is), but it is a gaping one. Lincoln, like Congressman Stevens, is served by historical advantage: it gets to ride its premise for so long because that premise is correct (slavery is bad). But no premise can be ridden forever and if Lincoln must go to Petersburg in order to comprehend the carnage he somehow hasn't comprehended until now, then we can at least be afforded a sit-down with a former slave. Or maybe a stand-up with a former slave: more scenes of Lincoln towering over everyone!

But if it must make these omissions, then at least it wrings all the drama it can out of what it keeps. Maybe it's because college zapped away enough of my soul, or maybe I just enjoyed watching James Spader being awesome, but I'll always love horse-trading scenes in smoke-filled back rooms, where sausage is being made. Lincoln's biggest success lies in not romanticizing the process. Until the end, when ratification seems assured (and I honestly can't recall whether that was a fair presumption at the time, or whether Lincoln is bluffing in order to change the subject with Confederate peace negotiators), the moral and political compromises are center stage and the film's drama is better for that acknowledgment. Yes, it makes for an incomplete dramatization, but you accept that sort of thing going in. The teary, elated celebration after the Amendment's passage through the House (spoiler number one) almost undercuts this, trading muddy politics for Spielberg's giving the audience what it wants, but as in real politics, the fact that something important got accomplished at all is worthy of celebration.

This disinclination toward romanticism mostly extends to it's its titular character. That is until the end, when Lincoln's assassination (that's the other spoiler) prompts a bleary-eyed flashback to his second inaugural address: the one that was supposed to lift our spirits and tell us what we could be, even while Lincoln's machinations sometimes involved everyone except the better angels. This is some of Spielberg's trademark manipulation, to be sure (see above), but it's not so different from our customary lionization of slain leaders, anyway. And while he's alive, we see every Lincoln action figure ever sold: tortured Lincoln; lawyer Lincoln; magnanimous Lincoln; shrewd politician Lincoln; happy family man Lincoln; reluctant family man Lincoln; backwoods, story-telling Lincoln (Secretary Stanton's reactions to the stories are a plus--that an actor has to wear that beard and play it straight is dichotomy at its finest). Day-Lewis plays them all wonderfully and these various versions ably highlight the man's many conflicting natures and his nimble, if over-wracked, brain. But they also remind us of just how difficult the man is to sum up in a 150-minute film. Surely, even after all that running time, there must be more here. And then we get thinking about all that could've, should've been. If we judge a film on what it's trying to do, then Lincoln has set the bar admirably high.

And we're back to the expectations thing. Like it's meta-textual subject (Lincoln is Obama, in case you missed it), we can't help but be underwhelmed when confronted with the real thing. And that feeling leads us to believe that the thing is less than it is, even if that thing isn't so bad in and of itself. Because truly, Lincoln is a fantastic piece of filmmaking whose only real flaw is being an impossible film to make.

Somebody should try for a James Polk biopic.

Grade: B