The first thing to be said about Steven Spielberg’s
Lincoln is what a brave idea it represents. It is that
rarest of cinematic creatures, a movie about political processes
(as opposed to political generalities and fine-sounding
aspirations) which somehow manages to avoid the otherwise certain
danger of boring its audience to death. The movie could have been
made to remind us of Enoch Powell’s dictum that “All political
lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture,
end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human
affairs.” This is about the “happy juncture” Lincoln had arrived at
before his sad end — which takes place off screen — and so ends
up as a movie about another most rare thing, political success.
Yet all of Mr. Spielberg’s considerable powers as a showman, all
of the claustrophobic interiors of his brilliant d.p., Janusz
Kaminski, all of the facility with clever dialogue of his
screen-writer, Tony Kushner, and all of the acting talent of Daniel
Day-Lewis in the title role, may have been necessary to keep us
from getting bogged down in back room horse-trading and deal-making
involved in the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution,
which outlawed slavery forever. The main thing is that they
succeeded, though the result is curious and worthy more than it is
noble and soaring in the manner now traditional for Hollywood
representations of the 16th president. It also manages to produce a
genuine emotional kick as well as a subtle apologia for the Obama
presidency. We shall return to that presently.
Of the top talents involved, the most important is that of Mr.
Day-Lewis, who makes his Lincoln completely believable without
diminishing the mystique which has always made his character’s
story such a favorite with the movies. I am rather a skeptic about
the “method” acting that he seems to go in for, but it has
certainly paid off in this case. Even the convoluted legal
explanation of why Lincoln needs to pass the Amendment during the
lame-duck session with Democratic support when he would find the
task far easier if he waited for a more sympathetic Republican
Congress two months hence briefly makes sense, coming from his
mouth. Both the unaffected folksiness of his laughter and
story-telling and the irritation it must have caused in many even
of his political allies ring true. At one point Bruce McGill as
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton interrupts the boss by saying, with
palpable exasperation: “No, you’re not going to tell a story. I
can’t bear to hear one.” The President falls into an easy,
masculine camaraderie with his “Team of Rivals” (to cite the title
of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on which the screenplay was
partially based), but we also find it easy to believe in his
underlying loneliness and his deep sadness.
Sally Fields as Mary Todd Lincoln also does a fine job in making
her character come alive, though her most important function is to
suggest a particular and personal reason for that sadness: the
death of their young son Willie, probably from typhoid fever, three
years earlier and the marital strife which ensued from (among other
things) her accusation that Lincoln’s grief for their child had
been given insufficient expression. A thunderous quarrel between
them on this subject is counterpointed and contrasted with a scene
of domestic tranquility and affection as the two of them ride out
together in the springtime and an open carriage, like a young
couple courting, as an expression of joy and relief at the end of
the war. Young Gulliver McGrath also helps to bring out the
domestic Lincoln as Tad, Willie’s brother who survived his illness
(though not, as it turned out, for long). But Joseph Gordon-Levitt
as the Lincolns’ oldest son, Robert, who drops out of Harvard to
take up a commission in the army in defiance of his parents’
wishes, is rather a distraction, in spite of his unfashionable plea
on behalf of honor.
It appears to have been Mr. Spielberg’s decision to narrow the
film’s focus from the epic scale suggested by the Civil War, which
mostly takes place off-screen, to the more parochial-seeming
struggle over Congressional passage of the 13th Amendment in
January of 1865, when the outcome of the war was no longer in
doubt. He has been helped to find the drama in the story by the
bravura performance of Tommy Lee Jones as the “Radical Republican”
leader in Congress, Thaddeus Stevens, whose egalitarian views
really were radical for their time. When, in order to pass the
Amendment, Stevens is required to repeat before the House, as if by
rote, “I don’t hold with equality in all things, only equality
before the law and nothing more,” the lie comes off as a noble one,
as it is meant to do — the shining and redeeming example of
under-handedness on the part of the forces of right and goodness by
whose light a great many more, and more doubtful ones, are meant to
be excused as essentially the same as the now-traditional Fabian
tactics of today’s “progressive” tendency.
A trio of dubious characters played as comic grotesques by James
Spader, Tim Blake Nelson, and John Hawkes are responsible for most
of the outright corruption we see, as they are licensed by
Lincoln’s right hand man, David Strathairn’s William Seward, and
later by Lincoln himself to offer patronage jobs in return for
votes. But Lincoln himself is also guilty of duplicity and
double-dealing, making promises he knows he can’t or won’t keep and
palming off one of his supporters, Hal Holbrook’s Preston Blair,
with a secret mission he has no intention of allowing to succeed.
The price of Blair’s support is an agreement to negotiate peace
with the South, and so he is sent to Richmond to retrieve
representatives of the collapsing Confederate government, including
Vice-President Alexander Stephens (Jackie Earle Haley). But Lincoln
arranges it so that the Southern ambassadors do not reach him in
time to make any sort of deal, short of unconditional surrender,
while lying to his own party by denying the rumors of the envoys’
mission or even their existence as such, since confirmation of the
rumors would also scupper the Amendment.
And this is where we return to the film’s relevance to today’s
politics. Thaddeus Stevens is given the task of pronouncing the
movie’s exquisite distillation: “The greatest measure of the 19th
century,” he says, “was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by
the purest man in America.” Does that sound like any Presidents
we know? Or at least like the language used by that
President’s most fanatical and slavish admirers? For of course the
unmistakable but unspoken corollary is: “… and that’s OK.”
The end, because it was so transcendently the right thing to do,
and because it was done from the purest of motives, must be
supposed to justify almost any means. All manner of corruption,
skullduggery and abuse of power are to be excused if their object
is noble enough. I wonder if that is a message that Hollywood would
have been quite so willing to promote four or five years ago, when
George W. Bush was President?
At a crucial moment in the vote hunting, Lincoln turns
imperious: “I am the President of the United States of America,
clothed in immense power, and you will procure me these votes!” he
says to his underlings. And they do! More than one commentator has
seen these words as a message from the left to President Obama, who
is seen as not being firm enough with today’s Republican rascals in
Congress, now transmogrified into the reactionary equivalent of the
apologists for slavery in their view. David Denby of
The New Yorker puts it like this:
The movie is, among other things, a message to the President: it
is not enough to make fine and noble speeches. In democratic
politics, you have to get tough and dirty. You have to use
patronage, personal persuasion, threats, whatever is at your
command. Lincoln made it possible for you to be President, and now
— in order to get policies, which you know are just, through the
Congress — you have to imitate the crafty and manipulative things
he did. End of message.
Without applauding the policy, I acknowledge that some such
message may indeed have been in the back of such minds as those
belonging to the very progressive Messrs. Spielberg and Kushner.
But I also think of the following passage, taken from
The Guardian, by another left-wing critic of the
President, Glenn Greenwald, who believes that his conviction of his
own all-justifying rectitude is too great, not too little:
Political leaders and political movements convinced of their own
Goodness are usually those who need greater, not fewer, constraints
in the exercise of power. That’s because — like religious True
Believers — those who are convinced of their inherent moral
superiority can find all manner to justify even the most corrupted
acts on the ground that they are justified by the noble ends to
which they are put, or are cleansed by the nobility of those
perpetrating those acts. Political factions driven by
self-flattering convictions of their own moral superiority — along
with their leaders — are the ones most likely to abuse power.
Mr. Greenwald, whose particular beef with the administration has
to do with its indiscriminate use of drone strikes to kill anyone
the President thinks might have the remotest connection to
Islamicist terrorism, thinks that the same moral arrogance was to
be found at the heart of the George W. Bush administration. Then
his fellow lefties thought it a very bad thing; now, as it comes
from the Obama — or the Lincoln — administration, it is a very
good thing. He objects, very honorably, to the hypocrisy. But maybe
such moral certainty is neither bad nor good so much as it is a
measure of the extent to which all politics today has been reduced,
rhetorically at any rate, to a quasi-mythical struggle between good
and evil. That is what seems a very bad thing to me.
