Steven Spielberg is one of the finest working directors in America today, and he’s got the most movies on the AFI Top 100 Movie list. While I personally prefer the work of David Fincher and Martin Scorcese to Spielberg when it comes to living directors, I do greatly admire Spielberg’s storytelling style. His work has a nice sense of grace to it, and even though at this point in his career he doesn’t seem able to make movies that are both satisfying popcorn flicks or deeply dramatic serious work, it’s rare that he doesn’t make a movie that isn’t at least interesting.
Note I said rare, not impossible. The BFG was pretty damn dull.
That said, I am generally of the opinion that Spielberg today can knock out a historical drama based on real events without breaking too much of a sweat. In point of fact, he seems to toss one out every second or third movie he makes these days. That’s fine. Most of them are quite enjoyable if nothing else. But when it comes to his best of those, I somehow had yet to see his 2012 movie Lincoln about the man many consider to be the greatest President the United States ever had. Well, the movie’s on Netflix until the middle of February. I might as well rectify that situation.
Rather than focus on the entire life of Abraham Lincoln, Spielberg’s story mostly focuses on roughly one month’s time. That would be January of 1865 when, fresh off his re-election but before the inauguration of a new, Republican-dominated House of Representatives, it would be rather easy to get said amendment passed. Instead, Lincoln (the magnificent Daniel Day-Lewis) has decided he wants it passed by the end of January in order to move on to the next step in the ratification process. To do that, the president will need to do some good, old-fashioned political dealings to win over a handful of lame duck Democratic Congressmen.
That’s actually something I really liked about this movie. It would be far too easy to paint Lincoln as simply a saint of a man whose general goodness and refusal to submit to the evils of slavery was all he needed to get the amendment passed. And while Day-Lewis’s Lincoln is still a good man, he also knows how politics works. That means being very precise in his language to avoid lying while placating various allies and attempting to woo some more. If anything, Lincoln’s first attempt is to simply let loose some rather sleazy political operatives (basically lobbyists) and let them do what they do best.
Meanwhile, we see a very human Lincoln philosophize with a couple guys working his telegraph machine, calm down an emotionally unstable Mary Todd (Sally Field), try to please oldest son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who just wants to join the army against his parents’ wishes, play with his younger son, and even find time to tell a dirty joke or two. This is Lincoln the man, and while he does hold a lot of moral authority, something he even uses effectively when he has to, he’s still just a flawed human being.
Spielberg did a lot I liked about this. Though he does flashforward to Lincoln’s assassination, he opts to show the night not as the president is shot but his young son Tad Lincoln’s (Gulliver McGrath) reaction to the news at a different location. Likewise, Speilberg populated his cast with a lot of actors who wouldn’t look too out of place in a 19th century setting for better or for worse. Seriously, this cast contains the likes of Tommy Lee Jones, Lee Pace, Jared Harris, Walton Goggins, Boris McGiver, Michael Stuhlbarg, Hal Holbrook, James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson, Jackie Earle Haley, Bruce McGill, and in some small roles the likes of Adam Driver, David Oyelowo, Lukas Haas, and Dane DeHaan.
Now, Spielberg did take some heat for changing the voting results at the end of the movie. I’m a forgiving type since it was obviously done to create drama. But I did feel that the Robert Lincoln plotline was a little weak compared to the others. It had the least to do with Lincoln’s main efforts to get the 13th Amendment passed, so it always felt a little tacked on. But really, if my only complaint about a movie is we didn’t need that much of Robert Lincoln, that’s a good sign of high quality.
Actually, Robert Lincoln was present for three of the four successful presidential assassinations in our nation’s history, being by his father’s bedside here, on the same train platform when James Garfield was shot, and arriving in Buffalo the same day William McKinley was shot. Plus, he was the only one of the Lincolns’ four children to survive past the age of 18, but went on to have a long political career of his own. Where’s his movie?
Grade: A-
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