Film Review | Lincoln

Night at the Museum

by Thomas Delapa 

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