Night at the Museum
by Thomas Delapa
Laws and sausages, it's been said, are best not watched being made.
Laws and sausages, it's been said, are best not watched being made.
There’s a generous
helping of the former—and a side of the latter—in Steven Spielberg’s
heralded historical biopic, Lincoln. But will movie-going voters stomach a
150-minute presidential profile in courage that feels like a heavy chip off the
block of Mount Rushmore?
No, Lincoln
doesn’t land in theaters with a crash or a thud. It’s more like a whisper, the kind
of hushed tone you’re schooled to use in museums and mausoleums. As a
biography, the title itself is a misnomer of sorts, since Spielberg and writer
Tony Kushner’s opus only spans a few months in early 1865, as the 16th
president pokes, prods and pushes Congress to pass the 13th Amendment outlawing
slavery in the U.S.
For nearly two
score years, Spielberg has been synonymous with blockbuster Hollywood entertainment,
alternating with his high-minded historical fare like Schindler’s List, The
Color Purple and Amistad. This prestige production is even further removed
from the patented Spielberg action formula. There’s nary an action scene to be
found in these parts, so there’s absolutely no mistaking it for Gettysburg—not
to mention Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Rather, Spielberg makes a
strategic retreat to Washington, D.C., training his camera on a foray of
low-key interior scenes that might as well been staged at Ford’s Theatre.
Towering
(literally) above the cast in beard and stovepipe hat is lanky Daniel
Day-Lewis, who’s a dead ringer for Honest Abe—with reedy voice and stoop to boot.
Evidently awestruck that his star looks like he just stepped out of a penny,
Spielberg constantly poses his star in pensive, heroic profile. The two-time
Oscar winner shrugs off his premature bronzing in a few forceful scenes, but he
generally keeps under wraps, weighed down by a long, dusty cloak of legend.
Instead of freeing the slaves, Day-Lewis should have insisted on emancipating his
painstaking performance style a tad.
Partially drawn
from a book (Team of Rivals) by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Kushner’s
script similarly gets bogged down in musty backroom political deal-making.
Sensing an opening as the grisly Civil War draws to a close, Lincoln and his
shrewd secretary of state, Seward (David Strathairn), hunt for votes in a
raucous House of Representatives, both from their own abolitionist Republicans,
led by an irascible Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), as well a handful of
Democrats who might be persuaded, pressured, even bribed. Unsure of the dramatic
bite of these smoke-filled shenanigans, Spielberg does his own logrolling,
slipping in comic touches gilded to cornpone fiddle music.
As HBO’s fine John
Adams mini-series showed, authentic American history can be truly compelling,
but Spielberg and Kushner are too reverent and mythologizing, even as they go
to pains to display Lincoln’s folksy, sometimes earthy wit. (Did you hear the
one about Ethan Allen, George Washington and the outhouse?) The solemn tone is
weighed down further by John Williams’ grandiose score, which chimes in with salutary
horns better enlisted for an Arlington processional march. I may be going out
on a limb here, but I do declare that the topic of slavery isn’t the hot-button
issue it used to be. Spielberg, however, still seems to be fighting the Civil
War, and, um, with horses and bayonets.
So you have to
ask, then, why the filmmakers were so keen on running this long, lavish
production up the flagpole, especially in an election year. Is it the curious
resemblances to the presidency of Barack Obama, also recently re-elected and
presiding over a bitterly divided Congress? While basic civil rights for
African-Americans are at the heart of Lincoln’s crusade, Kushner (Angels in America) may be
embedding his own topical amendments, from gender equality and racial
intermarriage to gay rights.
Whatever the
pertinent political motives, Lincoln makes for starchy, button-down history, more
monument than movie. It may be an honest Abe, but it’s not nearly a winning
one.
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11/20/12
