Lincoln
Steven Spielberg (2012)
Commendable but punitive, Lincoln (at 150 minutes) is shorter than Django Unchained but seems twice as long. As Anthony Lane suggested, it’s worth seeing the two films in close proximity but perhaps Spielberg first and Tarantino second is better. (I saw Django the day before Lincoln.) A phenomenal amount of skill and talent has gone into the making of this film. Janusz Kaminski’s precision lighting is even more remarkable than in War Horse: there are shots in which individual blades of grass are highlighted; there’s a view of Daniel Day-Lewis’s dark face from the left-hand side, in deep shadow but with the lashes of his right eye gilded by candlelight. Apart from the odd dodgy wig (not counting Tommy Lee Jones’s, which turns out to be intentional), the whole look of Lincoln is impressive – from Day-Lewis’s brilliant make-up to what appears to be the natural light (or lack of it) in rooms where, in January 1865, Abraham Lincoln and his supporters are urgently attempting to obtain passage through the House of Representatives of a bill to abolish slavery (the Thirteenth Amendment) before the imminent end of the Civil War. One criticism of the externals in the film: except for Tommy Lee Jones’s Thaddeus Stevens, with his unkempt, sweaty look, and Daniel Day-Lewis’s less than crisp shirt collar, everyone is a bit too clean and well groomed. Yet Lincoln, for all its technical sophistication, is hagiographic in a rather primitive way. Tony Kushner’s screenplay is adapted from a 2005 biography by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln) but Lincoln kept reminding me of Pauline Kael’s review of A Man For All Seasons:
‘[Thomas] More is simply right and he’s smart and good and just about omniscient … More is the only man of honor in the movie, and he’s got all the good lines. … [Robert] Bolt’s More is the kind of hero we used to read about in the biographies of great men written for twelve-year-olds: the one against the many. Perhaps people think A Man for All Seasons is so great because unlike the usual movie which is aimed at 12-year-olds, it’s aimed at 12-year-old intellectuals and idealists.’
Abraham Lincoln isn’t Spielberg’s ‘only man of honor’ but he does have most of the good lines and fumes of moral education hang heavy in the smoky rooms and debating chambers of the fiIm. I was conscious of being more irritated by this because there’s no arguing with the greatness of what Lincoln achieved, or with the fact that it should be honoured, but the movie needn’t have taken the form of a history lesson with shades of religious instruction. By the closing stages, after Lincoln’s assassination and in a flashback to his second inaugural address, the lecture theatre has just about metamorphosed into a pulpit. Lincoln is shown as having a taste for ribald anecdote yet Daniel Day-Lewis’s delivery of these pearls of humour, because it underlines the President’s shrewd humanity, makes him all the more irreproachable and annoying. You sympathise when one of the other characters is exasperated enough to say ‘Not another story!’ as Lincoln embarks on his latest parable. In response to this exclamation, Lincoln, of course, grins understandingly.
I think my mixed feelings about Day-Lewis informed my reaction to the film as a whole. His achievement here is as undeniable as Abraham Lincoln’s historical importance: a great man is being played by a great actor. (Day-Lewis is nailed on for the Oscar, even though he’s already won twice and will be the first male ever to win three times for a leading role.) He acts with supreme confidence: his voice is often quiet and surprisingly light but always commands attention. His shadowed eyes take Lincoln deep into himself – and seem to take Day-Lewis deep into Lincoln. He’s an astonishing image. As Michael Wood said in the LRB, Day-Lewis sometimes suggests a CGI Lincoln, especially in a sequence near the end of the film when he moves on horseback through the battlefield at Petersburg, Virginia – yet his mythic appearance is substantiated by human detail. The performance is a marvel – the saintly treatment of Lincoln could well have turned the film into a dud if Day-Lewis had continued to say no to Spielberg and he had cast Liam Neeson instead. (One of Day-Lewis’s many gifts is his ability to convey speed of thought, essential here and something which Liam Neeson struggles to do.)
Daniel Day-Lewis’s vanity as an actor also comes through, however – that is to say, the quality which means that he makes relatively few movies (this is only his tenth since My Left Foot, nearly a quarter of a century ago) and each one has to be a very special event. The Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton (Bruce McGill), at the moment of Lincoln’s death, pronounces that, ‘Now he belongs to the ages’: Daniel Day-Lewis tends to give the impression that he thinks the same of himself as an actor. He’s probably right too but I found this getting increasingly in the way as Lincoln marched onwards. You’re more and more aware of that compelling quietness of speech becoming an actor’s technique – even though it’s believable as a politician’s technique too. (The scene in which Lincoln eventually raises his voice and yells at his aides doesn’t have quite as much impact as you’d expect.) When Day-Lewis first appears on screen and talks simply and conversationally to two black soldiers, his bringing Lincoln to life seems miraculous and brought tears to my eyes. Eventually, I found him unmoving.
Spielberg, for a director better known for thrilling action than for talk, shows considerable self-discipline during the many political conversations. His restlessness is expressed in moments when he takes characters outdoors – as if to stretch his own film-making legs as well as theirs – and these scenes seem perfunctory when it’s minor characters who are taking the air. But one of the outside sequences is strong. The description of the tensions between Lincoln and his elder son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is pretty basic but, when a curious Robert follows a stretcher and the camera follows him, to a great pit into which the dismembered limbs of Civil War soldiers are being thrown, it’s one of the few times that the movement of the film is unexpected and throws you off balance. This is followed by a short, sharp argument between father and son, with Lincoln slapping Robert. Although Kushner’s screenplay concentrates on the negotiations over the Thirteenth Amendment bill, I welcomed the bits revealing Lincoln’s family life. Sally Field, as Mary Lincoln, still seems a conventional actress, after all these years, but the ill-matched pairing of President and First Lady pays dividends. Early on, Lincoln, although affectionate, seems condescendingly tolerant of the little woman; when Mary Lincoln begins to lose control, she causes her husband to do the same and the result is exciting. These outbursts are a relief, not because they’re anything special as drama but because Lincoln’s shortcomings as a husband and father, his capacity to infuriate his wife and his elder son, are a break from his relentless wisdom and control as a politician. (His relationship with his younger son (Gulliver McGrath) is simply idealised.) Apart from the two soldiers at the beginning, however, the few black characters in the story are a phony, condescending miscalculation, especially Mrs Lincoln’s confidante, the former slave Elizabeth Keckley (Gloria Reuben).
As Stevens, an ardent abolitionist Republican, Tommy Lee Jones’s vocal wit and flamboyance are manna from heaven. Stevens may be a good man but he has a flair for cruel invective and Jones takes full advantage of the lines Tony Kushner supplies him with, not only in the House of Representatives but also in a conversation with a stuttering, timorous Democrat (well played by Boris McGiver) who is ready to cross the floor of the House (if that’s what happens in America). Kushner does well, given how much of the script consists of imparting information, in writing different voices; and Spielberg orchestrates the overlapping dialogue skilfully. The acting generally is admirable – especially given the risk that’s been taken in giving good actors, in most cases, rather little to do. (The cast includes, among many others, David Strathairn, Hal Holbrook, Michael Stuhlbarg, James Spader, John Hawkes, Tim Blake-Nelson, Jackie Earle Haley and Jared Harris.) John Williams’s score is an apt reflection of Spielberg’s ambivalence towards the material, respecting the need for self-discipline while seeming to want to break out into something more dynamic. This becomes an increasing problem in Lincoln, which lacks the claustrophobic feel that a truly distinctive contribution to the political biography genre might have had: you feel you’re watching, rather than a suppressed epic, Spielberg’s energy being diverted the only way it can be – and turning the film pious. If he had held his nerve until the very end, the movie would have finished when Lincoln leaves for Ford’s Theatre but, though we don’t see the assassination, we get its aftermath in traditional style – followed by the inauguration speech – to put a seal on our morally improved state as we leave the Odeon. The best audience reaction in the cinema occurred at the point at which one of the congressmen declares his vote against the bill to abolish slavery. This is a man whom we’ve seen Lincoln trying to persuade to change his mind in a one-to-one conversation. When the ‘nay’ was said, there was an exclamation of surprise from someone behind us – who clearly felt this shouldn’t have happened when Daniel Day-Lewis had put in some serious acting to talk the fellow round.
28 January 2013