The new movie Lincoln was appropriately timed for
release in time for Thanksgiving, which President Lincoln declared
a national holiday. And this week is the anniversary of the
Gettysburg Address. There’s much to thank God for in the
accomplishments of Abraham Lincoln, including his aggressive push
for the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, on which the movie
focuses. Daniel Day-Lewis is superb as Lincoln, possibly the best
Lincoln portrayal ever, or at least since Raymond Massey.
Unlike Robert Redford’s somewhat ridiculous movie The
Conspirator last year, which tried to exonerate Lincoln
assassination conspirator Mary Surratt, Steven Spielberg’s
recreation of Civil War era Washington is good. The movie actually
filmed in Richmond and Petersburg. The very dome-less Virginia
Capitol was electronically morphed into the U.S. Capitol. One scene
ostensibly showing incendiary radical Republican Congressman
Thaddeus Stevens inside the U.S. Capitol actually shows the famous
1788 statue of George Washington inside the Virginia Capitol.
Otherwise, most of the Victorian interiors, especially in the White
House, seem right. I’m not sure, but the purported U.S. House of
Representatives chamber may actually be the restored old Illinois
statehouse. I don’t think the current U.S. House chamber, built in
the 1850s, ever had windows, and in the movie, sunshine flows in
during key debates.
All the performances are competent. But members of Lincoln’s
cabinet, except for Secretary of State William Seward, get short
shrift, despite the movie’s sourcing from Doris Godwin’s
cabinet-focused Team of Rivals. Although now too old, Gene
Hackman at some point in his career should have portrayed the
impatient, severe, and indispensable War Secretary Edwin Stanton,
whose petulant appearance here is too short. Aged Hal Holbrook is
suitable as political patriarch Francis Preston Blair, ensconced in
his still today famous house across the street from the White
House. Sally Field as First Lady Mary Todd captures Mrs. Lincoln’s
intelligent humanity and impending derangement.
Tommy Lee Jones purportedly steals the show as surly Thaddeus
Stevens — though Daniel Day-Lewis needn’t worry. The final scene
of the club footed and bewigged abolitionist from Pennsylvania sees
Stevens in bed with his black housekeeper and mistress, to whom he
proudly exhibits the just passed anti-slavery amendment. History is
not certain of the bachelor’s intimacy with his mixed race,
longtime maid to whom he bequeathed a small fortune. But the
evidence for it is greater than for the Thomas Jefferson-Sally
Hemings myth. Here the affair commends his racial virtue. In the
racist “Birth of a Nation” film a century ago, the character based
on Stevens is villainized through his black mistress.
Although the movie is about liberating enslaved blacks, the only
major black character is Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who
bought her own freedom as a renowned Washington seamstress, and who
later becomes a companion to Mrs. Lincoln. Ironically, she
previously worked for Mrs. Jefferson Davis when the future
Confederate president was still a U.S. senator. Too bad the movie
had no room for Frederick Douglass, who famously fought his way
into a White House reception after Lincoln’s Second Inaugural
Address, whose delivery is the closing scene. Lincoln had beckoned
him in through the crowd when blacks at such events were still
unusual, so as to as solicit his view of the speech. “A sacred
effort,” Douglass pronounced, eliciting Lincoln’s grateful
smile.
Also sad is that Lincoln’s most triumphal moment is omitted,
though it would have fit perfectly with Spielberg’s theme.
Lincoln’s entrance into captured Richmond, where he was greeted by
ecstatic crowds of then freed blacks in the streets, as wary whites
quietly observed from their windows, culminated with his visiting
the Confederate White House and sitting in Jeff Davis’s chair. To
one former slave who knelt before him, Lincoln reputedly implored
to kneel only before God.
Instead Lincoln is shown with General Ulysses Grant shortly
before at Petersburg, deeply introspective over the carnage. For a
brief moment General Robert Lee is shown silently leaving his
surrender to Grant at Appomattox. The actor portraying Lee seems
portlier than Lee is known to have been at the time, from the
iconic Mathew Brady photo just days later at Lee’s Richmond house.
(Lee wasn’t always slim and did enlarge during earlier, sedentary
parts of the war.) Grant is portrayed adequately as taciturn,
though he tells Lincoln how much he has aged, which seems a little
unlike him.
Lincoln himself is shown as even tempered, except when arguing
with his wife, or for dramatic effect with his cabinet. In one
unlikely scene he slaps his adult son for whining over his father’s
refusal to allow him into the army. But Lincoln was lax with his
children, whom others saw as undisciplined, and he didn’t likely
hit any of them at any age. He was distant with his eldest, who
later recalled that his total time with his father during the
presidency could be numbered in minutes.
With his son, Lincoln is seen approaching a church, which turns
out to be a hospital. Too bad there is not even fleeting admittance
of Lincoln’s growing spirituality during the war, amplified by the
death of one young son. He spent a lot of time at the New York
Avenue Presbyterian Church, to whose pastor he was close, as well
as attending many other churches, sometimes with cabinet
members.
This movie is not perfect. But it ascribes majesty where it
belongs, to Lincoln and the battle against slavery. It contrasts
with the cynical nihilism characterizing much of Hollywood, and
cites American democracy as a noble experiment.
Lincoln the movie, as Frederick Douglass said to its
subject, is a sacred effort.
