**/****
starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Tommy Lee Jones
screenplay by Tony Kushner
directed by Steven Spielberg
by Walter Chaw Bearing no relationship to the Gore Vidal biography with which it shares its name, Steven Spielberg’s predictably uneven Lincoln features moments of real grandeur narrated to death by John Williams’s inspiring™ and rousing™ score. No speech from Honest Abe (Daniel Day-Lewis) goes without ample and gaudy decoration, making me wonder which one Spielberg doesn’t trust to deliver the goods: Day-Lewis, or Lincoln. More to the point, what Spielberg probably doesn’t trust is the viewer’s intelligence and humanity, meaning the real question is whether he thinks the kind of people who would go to a movie about Abraham Lincoln are morons. Either way, it’s not the sort of behaviour that should be rewarded or go unremarked upon. Consider that the absolute best, most powerful moment of the film arrives within the first five minutes as Lincoln sits in a bivouac, taking questions from foot soldiers–and consider that this instance of naturalism is neatly destroyed by Spielberg’s instinct towards swatting flies with Buicks. What could have been an affecting, quiet bit with our most revered national figure ends with a clumsily proselytized mission statement as a black soldier recites the end of the Gettysburg Address–a not-subtle reminder that the mandate of Lincoln’s second term carried with it the responsibility to push the 13th amendment ending slavery through a divided Congress.
That’s actually what the entire film–beginning two months after Lincoln’s re-election and detailing how he connived, strong-armed, and politicked enough of his Democratic adversaries into voting with the abolitionist Republicans (I know, right? What the hell happened to the GOP?) to end the oppression of African-Americans in the United States–is about. Everything else is left to the margins: his “team of rivals” cabinet, the long exile of Jefferson Davis, the last hellish days of the Civil War… If you’re hoping that Spielberg has again succumbed to his worst instincts to deliver a Hall of Presidents feel-good piece about Abraham Lincoln vs. slavery, boy, are you in luck.
The problem is that what Spielberg does best–really all he does, anymore–is mythologize his subjects. This makes him the obvious but worst choice for a film about the single most mythologized figure in our short history. Henry Fonda didn’t want to play Lincoln because he compared it to playing Christ (it took a profane John Ford to bully him into it), and Spielberg is entirely incapable of treating Lincoln as anything other than a holy, sainted martyr. He consistently shoots Day-Lewis as part of a frieze, his every posture either tortured genuflection or monumental profile–and of course every time he opens his mouth to speak, there’s that goddamned music to sledgehammer the words’ import. Lincoln has two modes: the Great Emancipator as orator; and good ol’ Abe as folksy Mark Twain storyteller. Both are handled with the same lack of subtlety and, indeed, shame. Spielberg’s approach turns Abraham Lincoln into Paul Bunyan. Lewis’s best moment comes when he betrays in the middle of an otherwise-inconsequential meeting that he’s tortured and alone–a moment again murdered by Spielberg narrating as much first in a dream sequence (seriously), then in a fight with First Lady Mary Todd (Sally Field). No good scene goes unpunished. When Day-Lewis isn’t on screen, the film sags badly with the Keystone Cops exploits of a trio of lobbyists (James Spader, John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson) and the Revolutionary abuse-comedy stylings of Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones, because Don Rickles is busy doing Toy Story 4, you hockey puck). The climax is an argument and vote in the house that no amount of slow push-ins renders exciting; and the inevitable assassination is shown from the POV of youngest son Tad (Gulliver McGrath), who, wait for it, wasn’t there. The case for Spielberg being our most accomplished torturer and exploiter of children and their grief gains another foothold here. It’s the worst kind of manipulation, and caused a couple of titters for its ripeness at the preview I attended.
What’s left is a prestige piece not unlike Spielberg’s similarly vainglorious War Horse. It’s impossible not to be moved by an actor like Day-Lewis playing one of the true icons in American history; it’s also impossible not to be offended by Spielberg’s inability to resist printing the legend. Even the ways in which Lincoln skirted the law and worked the system–doing things that are, in his own words, “impeachable”–to pass the amendment (up to and including, the film suggests, delaying the end of the Civil War to leverage more votes) are presented as pure fait accompli: the known ends justifying the at-times-questionable means. There’s room for nuance aplenty in Lincoln, and Tony Kushner’s screenplay manages to draw ambiguity from a number of situations (the Lincolns’ marriage, Mary Todd’s sanity, Lincoln’s political tactics, the toll of the War in its last days), but Spielberg steamrolls opportunities for resonance in favour of ossified gallery tableaux meant to buff a story already polished to a blinding sheen.
A late revelation that Stevens is “married” to his maid (S. Epatha Merkerson) provides the film’s most troubled moment not for the revelation itself, but for the way the screening audience gasped at the idea of miscegenation, a hundred-and-fifty years after the end of the Civil War. The lasting impact of Lincoln, released in the United States on the heels of a contentious and racially-coded presidential election, is how familiar is the intolerance, how clear are the lines drawn across class and race. Despite Spielberg’s best attempts to make mawkish Lincoln’s words and actions, they resonate still as stirring, painful reminders that maybe you only get one Lincoln, and now he’s gone and we have to figure all this shit out for ourselves. Lincoln, in other words, is only interesting in spite of itself. It’s Spielberg’s Passion of the Christ, really, and no one needs to see it to know exactly what it is and how it’ll go about it.
well the good news is now that this film is a dud, it’ll clear the way for argo to be recognize. Maybe get Affleck into the oscar contention that he so deserves.
I could smell the wax candy coating on the trailer. Why make a movie about a relic?
@takethecake
Don’t count on it. Nine out of ten critics are head over heels for this thing, I got here looking for somebody who wasn’t quaffing the Kool-Aid. Praise be to you, Walter Chaw.
This review is a joke, tainted by your obvious anti-Spielberg bias going in. And for the record, it is quite evident during the film that Tad was not present during the assassination, but was instead informed of it while watching a separate show in another theater on the same night, (which is historical fact by the way). Why do you think someone would have had to come on stage to inform the audience, (including Tad), that the president had just been shot if the crowd had just witnessed the assassination, (and John Wilkes Booth jumping on stage afterwards), for themselves? Dolt. You just made a fool of yourself and don’t even realize it.
Thank you, Mr. Chaw, for what is obviously one of the few reasonably objective reviews of this film. Our most obvious director, coupled with an actor who leaves no piece of scenery unchewed, together for an exercise in hagiography of dubious historical merit–one word suffices. Deadly.
Even Day Lewis’s impression and make up
can’t get this dud off the ground.
—the 6th—7th? Lincoln —and again with
Sally Field?
ALLLL this as revelations sweep the world of Hollywood’s
4 decades of eager, anxious and KEY collusion in
delivering predictive programming for debasement and
EUGENICS.
ALLLLL this as- – –
—the 200th Anniversary of Napoleon’s Defeat at Moscow
—the 100th Anniversary of the Jeckyl Island coup against America
—-the 40th Anniversary of the Rockefeller-NIXON-MAO
handover summit
—-and the 60th Anniversary of the RED China, Globalism,
EUGENICS and GENOCIDE —‘uncomfortable’
——————KOREAN WAR——————-
—are ‘mysteriously overlooked’ . . .
Spielberg continues to deliver stale PC moral alibis
——for himself. . .
You sir know nothing about film. This film will go down in history as one of the great American films of all time while you will still be sitting in your underwear in your parents basement. Seriously as a student of Lincoln and of film I found this to be an fascinating and illuminating portrayal. I’m sure Daniel Day Lewis and Spielberg will be thinking about your review as they collect their Oscars.
Why does every hater think Walter lives in his parents’ basement clad in nothing but underwear? Projection bias?
I’m sitting in my underwear, down in your basement, Chaw! I’m refiling (and defiling) screener discs in the wrong sleeve-lets.
The text is coming from inside the house!
I haven’t seen the movie, but I enjoy Walter’s reviews, and I can testify that Spielberg does indeed suck.
Years ago I found Walter Chaw by glimpsing what is still my favorite description of a film: X-Men 3 is “Michael Bay’s Schindler’s List”. It still makes me laugh. Now I have “Spielberg’s Passion of the Christ” to add to that.
Inscrutable Ted:
What’s so frustrating is that Spielberg doesn’t have to suck. The guy’s potential is there to see in all his best movies (and moments) – it’s just unfortunate that he hasn’t made a near-great film in nearly two decades.
Thank you for this review. Completely agree with you. I should have seen this movie on Thanksgiving, it’s such a turkey. The history buffs who seem to adore it may have read a lot of popular biographies of Lincoln, but they aren’t trained historians, which I happen to be. The telegraphed inevitability that oozes out of every pore of this movie was painful to sit through. I hoped it would end with the incredibly obvious, I-can’t-believe-people-didn’t-see-it-coming scene of Stevens in bed with his housekeeper (a similar gasp from the packed house, which shocked me). But no, this bird wasn’t dead yet. Ugh. P.S.: I also made the comparison of this depiction to any one of many about Jesus of Nazareth, but you said it better than I did.
This review sucks and the Spielberg Shoah business apologist who criticized chaw sucks harder.
Chaw clearly doesn’t have the requisite historical knowledge to wax poetic about this propagandized piece of trash masquerading as a biopic.
But of course his intellectual inferiority complex, which manifests itself with a nauseatingly indulgent use of multisyllabic words and run-on sentences, won’t allow him to concede this fact. So instead of doing the proper research for writing this review, you know like a REAL writer would, he is content to criticize Spielberg on stylistic points.
Thanks, Walter, for some of the only sane words I’ve read about this film. And what about Spielberg’s inability to bring a movie to its conclusion? (Think bright-colored, jarring progression of survivors at the end of Schindler’s List to conclude what had been a remarkable black/white movie with only an enigmatic bit of muted red). Lincoln ended, but then it didn’t because we had to sit through a tacked-on POV of the assassination, which I thought would end it, but no. Then we sit through another anti-climactic bit with Lincoln delivering a Jesus-impersonation (Was it my imagination that his arms were outstretched? I hope so.) to an adoring crowd with music swelling to the point of drowning out his words. If this film is elevated by anything, it has to be Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance. What a shame that it was in danger of being overpowered by Spielberg’s penchant for lighting extravaganza and maudlin music.
Such an astounding movie to watch. This movie bring to life, the life of President Lincoln.
I would highly recommend this movie for anyone interested in American History.
Click Here!
The telegraphed inevitability that oozes out of every pore of this movie was painful to sit through. I hoped it would end with the incredibly obvious,
As a trained historian, I wonder why “large pore” goes back in time in the comments section to quote a sentence and a fraction of Bethie’s pretentious prose. It was groundbreaking the first time but it does lose some of its sparkle the second go-around. Was it an odd homage or a case of blatant thievery? Or simply one person a bit too enamored with himself? I’m guessing the latter.
Did I mention that I’m a trained historian?