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.

------------------------

11/20/12

Film Review | The Conspirator

Northern Exposure

by Thomas Delapa


It was a Southerner, William Faulkner, who said, “The past is never dead, it’s not even past.”

And so too with the Civil War, 150 years hence. With modern America’s polarizing battles on states’ rights about everything from health care to immigration law, there may be more disunion in these United States than at any time since the Vietnam War.

Set on the eve of Reconstruction, The Conspirator sets out to reconstruct the little-known, but telling, events that followed in the wake of Lincoln’s fateful assassination. Any smart 5th grader can tell you that John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, but how many of us know that he was only one member of a larger conspiracy that aimed to send most of Lincoln’s cabinet to kingdom come?

At the very least, Robert Redford’s weighty courtroom drama is downright rebellious in its thoughtful and reasoned pace, lined up against the scattershot caliber of today’s Hollywood. In this his best film since Quiz Show, Redford marshals winning performances from his cast, led by Robin Wright and Atonement’s James McAvoy.

One doesn’t need to be Shelby Foote to feel the 21st century reverberations in the way Redford and his screenwriters shape the story of Mary Surratt (Wright), the one woman put on trial for the conspiracy. Though she was a citizen—if a Southern sympathizer—the government ordered that she be tried in a military tribunal, not a civilian court. So although the evidence was patently circumstantial, her defense was next to impossible. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline) was out for swift revenge—and to make sure those damn, cotton-pickin’ Rebs learned their lesson.

Redford takes up Surratt’s cause, much in the same wary way that her young, inexperienced Northern lawyer, Frederick Aiken (McAvoy) does. Reluctantly taking her case, Aiken alienates his friends and his betrothed (Alexis Bledel) in his fight to save Surratt from the gallows. Like Lee at Gettysburg, Aiken faces major odds, especially with Stanton deviously tipping the scales behind the scenes.

So while you’re witnessing the diligent acting from McAvoy and company, Redford’s pace will allow you time to weigh the strong evidence of irony afoot. For a trial about an insidious conspiracy, Stanton—who could be a bearded Donald Rumsfeld—is busy rigging his own conspiracy. We can also strenuously object at the way Surratt’s constitutional rights are trampled upon, this in the days following a horrific war expressly meant to save the republic and its Constitution.

While didactic, and a mite dry, The Conspirator makes its plea for truth and fairness, set off against dim, stuffy interiors that blot out the few rays of truth. The (im)moral of the story is that, in times of war, politics trump justice. But Redford serves to remind us as individuals—whether blue, red or gray—of the cowardly and dishonest choices we make when we march in lockstep to the drumbeat of expedience.

-------------
4/25/11