 |
| Man meets myth in Spielberg's Lincoln. |
««« Lincoln. Written by Tony Kushner, based on the book Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns
Goodwin. Directed by Steven
Spielberg.
Abraham Lincoln wasn't just a
vampire-slayer. He did some other stuff most folks
are only vaguely aware of today, such as "preserve the Union" and "deliver
slavery into the dustbin of US history". According to historian and
tenured talking head Doris Kearns Goodwin, he was also kind of sexy. Alas, the
relevant question in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln
is not whether the man was sexy, but whether the passing of his legislative program was.
And the answer is: "sort of."
Based in part on Goodwin's book Team of Rivals, the script by Tony
Kushner (Angels in America, Munich) focuses on a key episode in
Lincoln's presidency. Just after he was re-elected, but before the south was
defeated, Lincoln sought to push through
a 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. Most of
the House of Representatives was
against it because it
would vastly complicate reconstruction of the defeated states. Many Northern
whites, while abhorring slavery, frankly weren't quite sure how the nation
would accommodate millions of former slaves
who would demand justice, jobs and, inevitably, the vote. This movie Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an abolitionist, but the soft-spoken kind. To get his amendment passed, he must
pretend that it will hasten the end of the war that is hurtling to a close
anyway.
Lincoln
is about nothing more than the legislative process in America—a messy, nearly-always dismaying
spectacle that has famously been compared
to sausage-making. ("You don't want to know too much about how either laws
or sausages are made.") We are treated to nearly
two and a half-hours of Presidential arm-twisting, as Lincoln entreats his
opponents, bullies his clients, and calls in his political debts to get the job
done. The saintly Abe isn't above bribery, handing out government sinecures
through the unctuous services of one W.N. Bilbo (played with brio by James
Spader). Lest the war end too early, he
arranges for a Confederate peace commission not to reach Washington before the
vote. It's a brave choice the filmmakers have made, to
focus less on the cult of Lincoln than on the greasy cogs of a political machine he operated.
Politics, after all, is the profession we all love to hate, with the
United States Congress polling lower than Richard Nixon at
the height of Watergate.
It all works largely due to a subtle, smart
performance by Day-Lewis. The challenge he took on
here can't be understated. Unlike, say, Anthony Hopkins’s Nixon or Meryl
Streep’s Margaret Thatcher, Lincoln is universally beloved figure who comes
loaded with hoary preconceptions that can't be avoided. The only comparable
historical figure played regularly in movies might be Jesus Christ. It's far
easier to play Jesus, in fact, as most people don't expect him to be a
plausible human being. (Indeed, some people become angry if Jesus is played as a real person.)
Here, Day-Lewis must steer a course
somewhere between mythic and avuncular. He does it largely by being the only adult
in the room—the person who supplies whatever the moment requires, whether it be
a dose of tension-breaking humor or a blast of stem-winding passion. This Lincoln
is great because he's a humble figure who makes other people realize their greatness.
He's supported ably by Sally Field
in the thankless role of Mary Todd Lincoln—who knows full well she’ll be
remembered chiefly as a millstone around a great man's neck—and by Tommy Lee
Jones, as a Republican congressman with an agenda and a very big secret.
Otherwise, there are perhaps too many recognizable faces here (Good Night, and Good Luck’s David Strathairn,
Deadwood's John Hawkes, Joseph
Gordon-Levitt, Jack Earle Haley, et al.) in tiny roles. The casting gives the
movie the air of a feel-good middle-brow TV miniseries where everybody wants to
be seen but there aren't enough lines to go around.
Day-Lewis and Co. collectively make us
forget Lincoln is an unlikely kind of
success. Talky to a fault, it features dialog of such Victorian orotundity that
half of it is probably incomprehensible to the casual viewer. We might also
wonder if the passage of the 13th Amendment really is the best
moment to dramatize in a Presidency chock full of significant moments. Rounding
up votes in Congress can be tough, but it is straightforward, and it is a
contest where it is easy to keep score. The sustained effort of mature minds,
of persistence in the face of almost unrelenting bad news, is harder to sell to
audiences with attention spans measured in seconds, not years.
One fault it does not have is one suggested in the pages
of The New York Times by historian
Kate Masur, who writes “It’s
disappointing that in a movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in
the United States, African-American characters do almost nothing but passively
wait for white men to liberate them.” Never
mind that the first two scenes in the movie feature black soldiers who are
doing just that—fighting to liberate their people. Indeed, in one scene a black
soldier is literally grinding a Confederate soldier’s face into the mud. It’s
not surprising that specialists like Masur yearn to the see the fruits of their
research reflected by Hollywood. No doubt many blacks didn’t “passively” wait
for white to liberate them. But they did
wait, largely for the outcome of a titanic struggle waged overwhelmingly by
armies of whites fighting each other.
No doubt this is a good Lincoln. It could have been an even better
one, but the fault for that lies more with us than the material.
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro
No comments:
Post a Comment