REVIEW
Lincoln
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field
Where: Cineplex Oden Victoria
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Parental guidance: Violence, adult themes
Rating: ??? 1 /2 (out of five)
JAY STONE Postmedia News
Six score and 12 minutes ago, we went into the movie theatre to see Lincoln, a biography of the 16th president of the United States that was conceived in reverence and dedicated to the proposition that Steven Spielberg should get another Oscar, and Daniel Day-Lewis along with him.
We emerged thinking that they might, too: Lincoln, which seems to be a minute-by-minute account of the final months of his life, is exactly the sort of quality project that lifts hearts, minds, box office receipts and Academy Award votes. All men may be created equal, but Spielberg always gets a little extra look at nomination time.
It's not all fine speeches and homespun wisdom either. Among the waving flags and the soaring clarinets (with a chance of trumpets) in John Williams's bombastic score, there's a tale of down-and dirty politics. Lincoln, based on the book by Doris Kearns Goodwin - and condensed by Tony Kushner into a rush of vaguely remembered names played by highly creased faces - is a sophisticated political thriller, even if it does beg you to salute the democratic process at every turn.
As the Civil War is winding down, Lincoln (Lewis, looking suitably stooped and worried, but with the crinkled eyes of an unreconstructed storyteller) is trying to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which would abolish slavery. It's a popular issue only because it will end the war, but the South is preparing to surrender anyway. Therefore, it's in Lincoln's interest to extend the conflict for the greater good.
It's a complex issue and it places the American icon in the centre of a muddy fight in which he not only delays the peace, he bribes Democrats - the party that supports slavery - with political favours to get their votes. That he manages to do this and still be sympathetic, wise, patient and long-suffering is a tribute to Lewis's art and Spielberg's natural abilities at myth making.
Both of them know the limits of piety, even if Williams has forgotten the dangers of throwing in the soaring piano music at every hint of human decency.
Lincoln is a great one for sitting down and telling a story, but the screenplay has cabinet members throwing up their arms at the prospect of yet another anecdote even as the president starts the one about what Ethan Allen said when he saw a picture of George Washington in a British privy. It's a moment of fun that helps humanize the Great Emancipator.
Like an abbreviated version of Finding Private Ryan, Lincoln begins with a scene of Civil War brutality: soldiers of the 2nd Kansas Colored massacring rebel troops at the Battle of Jenkins Ferry. This isn't a war story, however. Much of Lincoln is told in the darkened rooms of the White House, where the president - outlined against lace curtains, kneeling to tend a log in the fireplace or just sitting in controlled passion - is trying to save both the union and his marriage to Mary Todd (Sally Field), a woman who divides her time between hectoring her husband and grieving for a lost son. (Their youngest son, Tad, dwells in the corner of the film, studying photographs of abused slaves that serve to remind us of what's at stake.)
The real drama, though, takes place at the House of Representatives. As Secretary of State William Seward (David Straithairn) urges the politically expedient road - end the war and forget about this abolition stuff - Lincoln allows a group of roughneck fixers to hand out patronage appointments to any Democrat willing to support the amendment. At the same time, he has to keep the Republicans in line, especially Thaddeus Stevens, a powerful politician played by Tommy Lee Jones with a delightfully sour combination of misanthropy and sarcasm.
Jones, who is growing so wrinkled that the bags under his eyes have their own bags, steals every scene he's in. No one can call a political opponent a "fatuous nincompoop" with quite the same air of authority.
The House debates are raucous and bloody-minded - politics with its gloves off - and while Spielberg can't wrest much uplift from the final vote (though not for lack of piano music) he generates a real sense of its rawness.
Lincoln himself comes across as a measured man. Lewis keeps his fire on a low flame, quietly navigating the underlying tone of hagiography and emerging as a believable man, and exactly the kind of pragmatic idealist America could use today. The stovepipe hat would have to go, of course, and Mary Todd would have to be cleaned up a bit, but that patronage idea is a doozy.
