HISTORICAL ENIGMA: a review of "Lincoln"

"LINCOLN" 

Based upon The Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Screenplay Written by Tony Kushner

Directed by Steven Spielberg

*** (three stars)

Star ratings are just so arbitrary. In fact, they are sometimes meaningless.

Ever since I became aware of film criticism as my love of movies developed as a child, I paid close attention to the task attributing star ratings at the top of film reviews. Certainly, not every writer utilizes the zero to four (or sometimes even five star) ratings but generally, this is what we all see when we do scope out film reviews, whether newly released or films from the past. I would gather than some people would only look at the star rating as the sole critical barometer. Now, I am not about to engage you with a dissertation about the validity or uselessness of star ratings but that being said, I do have to say that a star rating sometimes cannot even begin to tell the whole story of a viewer's experience and reaction to certain films. As you all know very well, not all four star films are equal and one star films may be one star films for a whole host of reasons. And sometimes, perhaps most importantly, the stars in between are the murkiest of all.

At the top of this review for Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln," you will easily see that I have given the film three stars, which generally means that overall, the film is a solid piece of work but it is also not superlative either. To arrive at that particular rating, I performed a completely imprecise form of "Mathematics." Some parts of the film were indeed "four star worthy" while other sections maybe ranged somewhere within the "two and a half star" area and thus, I arrived at three stars by splitting the difference. Ridiculous isn't it? But this time, dear readers, I ask all of you to actually pay the least amount of attention to the star rating and even more attention to the content of this review as I really feel that the words will be more illuminating than any star rating could possibly be. 

"Lincoln" is indeed a good film. A very good film presented with the cinematic elegance that you would expect from any film directed by Steven Spielberg, one of our cinematic storytelling masters who remains at the top of his game. I would not discourage any of you from seeing the film. In fact, I implore you to indeed make the time to see this finely crafted piece of work as I feel the film owes as much to the time of Abraham Lincoln as it does to the life and times we all belong to in the 21st century. My reaction to the film overall is not one that is necessarily muted but one that is more contemplative and searching as perhaps what I may have been looking for within this work was quite possibly not designed to be there at all, which then does make for a completely different experience than I thought that I would receive initially. Since 1977, Steven Spielberg has taken me through a world of experiences, adventures, wonders, horrors and emotions through environments and locations, real and imagined, and always visualized with absolute greatness. This time, he has profoundly given me a considerable amount to ruminate over. Please allow me to take you upon my journey.

As the course of "Lincoln" is decidedly not plot driven, what I am able to describe to you is simple.  Spielberg's "Lincoln" opens at the beginning of January 1865 as President Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) has also begun his second term in office. With the Civil War raging onwards, Lincoln is fiercely determined to have the 13th Amendment, a law declaring the full abolishment of slavery, passed by the  United States House Of Representatives. As he fears deeply that his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation would be thrown out by the courts should the Civil war conclude as quickly as he expects and consequently, the 13th Amendment would be discarded by the slave states, Lincoln doggedly tries to ensure the Amendment passes by the end of January, this ensuring that slaves already freed would not be re-enslaved. 

In addition to his potentially history altering political dealings, Lincoln also navigates the troubled waters of his home life as he struggles with the intense depression of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Field) as well as the return of his son Robert Todd Lincoln (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt), who had departed his studies at Harvard armed with the full determination to join the Union solders in the Civil War.

For the full breadth its two and half hour running time, Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln," featuring the breathtaking cinematography by longtime Spielberg associate Janusz Kaminski, is an impeccably presented, helmed and acted motion picture that beautifully evokes a time and place as realistically as if you were actually there. Yet for me, I truly believe that the real star of the film was the luxurious screenplay written by celebrated Playwright Tony Kushner ("Angels In America") who also collaborated with Spielberg on 2005's "Munich." I cannot express enough how thrilling it was to sit and listen to such rapturous dialogue that the actors certainly ate with a knife, fork and spoon and asked for seconds! Kushner's words completely force you to pay attention, decipher, and keep pace. That refusal to dumb itself down made "Lincoln" a refreshingly adult film-going experience, a rarity that gives audiences something to reach for rather than be catered to. As this film is obviously going to be headed to receiving a healthy share of industry attention and awards, Kushner's work should be high on the list of worthy recipients.

For those of you who may have been put off by the unabashed and unapologetic emotional quality of Spielberg's "War Horse" (2011), "Lincoln" is such a full testament to Spielberg's complete mastery of cinematic storytelling and tonality as he has wisely and defiantly eschewed nearly all of his standard filmmaking trademarks (save for his ever present image of hazy lights flowing into darkened rooms). Even the score from his longtime Composer John Williams is reduced to a bare minimum. What Spielberg has accomplished powerfully is to create an experience that is urgently cerebral. "Lincoln," while appropriately solemn and stately, is essentially a meditation upon the process of our politics. While that, in and of itself, may not sound terribly exciting to view, Spielberg creates great tension by having nearly the entire film rest upon the act of attaining votes from people who do not want to give them as the end result of of passing the 13th Amendment into the law of the land would bring the nation into an unknown new world where Black people would walk upon equal footing as Whites once and for all. It is a film that intelligently explores racism as well as politics and how the two are intertwined to an almost insurmountable degree.

For that matter, I felt it to be brilliantly shrewd of Spielberg to have his film released just after our most recent Presidential election, and especially after Barack Obama has won his second term in office. Much like how Ben Affleck's "Argo" provided a subtle re-examination of our political process (especially during an international crisis) under the leadership of President Jimmy Carter, "Lincoln" is a film designed for audiences to make connections and parallels between Lincoln's and Obama's respective turns in office. We are meant to recognize both men are at almost the same point in time in their Presidential careers (nearly two months after re-election) and they are also placed within similar political positions. Both men had/have to decide whether or not to utilize any sense of newly attained political capital to obtain a scant yet crucial amount of votes in order to bring a sense of seismic social/political change (For Lincoln, the end of the Civil War and the full emancipation of all African-Americans. For Obama, leveling the playing field of the current societal class warfare between the wealthiest 1%-2% and the remaining 98%-99%.). Furthermore, we are asked see how much the beast of politics has changed between 1865 and 2012 and how, quite frankly, it hasn't changed very much at all. 

Returning to the whole issue of star ratings, all of what I have described would seem to be perfectly deserving of a four star rating. But, as I previously stated, dear readers, try to place the star rating into the background this time. You see, for everything that "Lincoln" gave me to mentally chew upon, and how thankful I am that Steven Spielberg accomplished such a feat, the film did keep me a bit at arms length. I am not mentioning this as a flaw per se, but just as an observation. I have to mention that growing up, and to this day as well, the academic subject of History was never my strong suit. It was an area I struggled with as the amount of dates, names, facts and figures would all swim around in my brain in a jumble, making everything a dusty textbook chore and my less than considerable interest would tend to wane more than it already had. It was difficult for me to digest all of the information successfully, for if I had been able to perform that task, the greater, underlying themes of the times would indeed have made more sense and would have become much more meaningful to me. And then, there is my naturally inquisitive nature that questioned the validity of everything I had been exposed to in textbooks anyway. Certainly not the undisputed dates, names, facts and figures, of course. But the fact that History is the shared product of every single person who has lived through the period and because not every voice has been documented, I would typically argue as to how reliable could everything in the textbooks actually be. And thus, everything then became even more of a jumble.

I mention this academic issue of mine because there is a dusty, textbook quality to "Lincoln" that, at least for me, never really left the screen. Everything appeared to be so realistically lived in visually, but emotionally, not much burst to life and that emotional distance made "Lincoln" an experience that did not transcend its textbook qualities to become something emotionally vibrant. Now, this is not to say that "Lincoln" was boring. It is not, by any stretch. I was undeniably interested, the film most certainly resonated with me but I was still having a problem connecting. For example, I was struggling with the identities of certain people here and there. I was unsure if Elizabeth Keckley (Gloria Reuben), the handmaiden  to Mary Todd Lincoln was a slave or if she happened to be a free woman. Other characters, like the ones very well played by James Spader and John Hawkes for instance, really bogged me down for a spell as I was unsure as to who they were, what they were doing and their relationships to other characters. While those details and others fell into place eventually, that trouble connecting had me spinning my mental wheels longer than I had wished, and therefore made me disconnect from what was happening on screen as I tried to piece things together. 

Dear readers, trust me, I do understand that "Lincoln" is a film about governing. People are emotional where policies, while being inanimate, are therefore unemotional but it ultimately felt as if the film was about policy at the expense of people. Steven Spielberg is, without question, one of our most humane filmmakers even when the material happens to exist at its most repugnant and horrific. But "Lincoln," more often than not, struggled to exist beyond the history lesson aspect for me as I found myself not truly gathering the full humanity of the piece. While every single performance in the film is at the high level we would expect from any Spielberg film, for my money, only Tommy Lee Jones as Republican congressional leader and fierce abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, found and injected a real sense of the blood and fire that pulses deeply inside of the politics.  

My difficulties with the film even extended themselves to the title character and Daniel Day-Lewis' performance. For a film that is called "Lincoln," I was surprised to discover that I really didn't learn very much about him. What we see is a brooding, looming, deliberately paced and meditative figure who is a loquacious raconteur filled with platitudes, homilies, speeches and stories and also, and strangely, a foresight into a social/political future that he could not possibly have. Daniel Day-Lewis, who by now you have all seen bears a eerily striking resemblance to the 16th President of the United States Of America, has delivered a performance that is a technical marvel. Not only does Day-Lewis completely bury any and all traces of any of his past performances, he does the very same to his own natural personality. Daniel Day-Lewis is never to be seen on screen, only Abraham Lincoln. And yet, there was something odd to me about his portrayal.   

Like the film overall, Daniel Day-Lewis' characterization of Abraham Lincoln was solemn and stately but he also felt to me to be ghostly. This Abraham Lincoln appeared to me as a walking wraith who possessed a near otherworldly quality that dulled any sense of the man's true humanity, whatever that may have been. This Abraham Lincoln remained such an enigma to me that he was almost unknowable. I could not help but to be reminded of past performances by the likes of Ben Kingsley in Sir Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi" (1982), Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone's "Nixon" (1995), or Denzel Washington's greatest performance in Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" (1992), as well as Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela in Clint Eastwood's "Invictus" (2009) or even Willem Dafoe's searing work as Jesus Christ himself in Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation Of Christ" (1988). All of those performances delved into the humanity contained in those historical figures, making their experiences tangible, understandable and surprisingly relatable. Day-Lewis, on the other hand, felt kind of like an impersonal hologram projected into 1865 from the great beyond.

I have say that throughout my life, I have harbored a bit of an inner conflict concerning Abraham Lincoln. Without question, I am forever indebted to his political legacy for if the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment had never come to pass, how could I, your friendly neighborhood film enthusiast, possibly be sitting here at this point in time, inside of my own home, writing film reviews for all of you? The political ramifications of his actions have resulted in the continued evolution of my race, so my gratitude is endless. However, and with special thanks to a fiery Social Studies teacher from high school, what has clouded me about Abraham Lincoln was the fact that I could never really know what his full motives behind the passing of the 13th Amendment actually were. Was it a true altruistic act of moral fortitude or was the emancipation of African American slaves a political byproduct of ensuring the South would not secede from the Union and ending the Civil War. Was the overall health of the nation placed ahead of a sector of the population or was the health of the nation knowingly bound to the very health of that very same sector of the population? I broached this very subject with my Mother as she was extolling the virtues of the Ralph Ellison novel Juneteenth and her response to me was simply, "Does it matter?"

     "Does it matter?" I asked in reply.

     "Yes, does it matter whether he truly believe din the equality of the races or not because what truly matters is that he still did it. He made the Emancipation proclamation happen. He still did it regardless of what he may have truly felt."

"Does it matter?" That question stuck in my head as I viewed "Lincoln" and it made me wonder if the humanistic qualities of Abraham Lincoln were purposefully not included in the film by Spielberg as it is a film about policy, governing and most importantly, the idea of equality between the races and all human beings as a whole. How the idea will outlast the life of the man, who was indeed a product of the times in which he lived. Maybe what I had hoped to find in the film was never designed to be included at all. And furthermore, maybe what I was looking for, and what, I guess, I am still looking for is an answer to something that cannot be answered as the man himself is not here to elucidate upon his state of social/political/moral consciousness. 

And perhaps my Mother is absolutely correct because in the end, what truly matters when the passion lies within the law itself? Maybe that is what Steven Spielberg is trying to accomplish with "Lincoln," a film that daringly remains emotionally ambiguous about its titular subject but defiantly committed to depicting how words and ideas can alter the course of a nation's history.

And how do you place a significant star rating onto something like that?