Movie review: Lincoln

The joke is that Lincoln didn't do well in theaters...

A friend of mine has as part of his profile that he stayed awake in class. By and large, I spent my time doodling or writing notes to my friends.  So I found suspense in this movie where there should not have been. I thought Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation. But as he and everyone else knew (except me) this was a largely symbolic gesture and had little, if any, effect on the slaves being held in the "nation" of the Confederacy. 

Lincoln is a movie on several levels. It is the story of the 13th Amendment which did free the slaves in 1865 and it is also the story of Lincoln, the man, husband, father, national icon and master manipulator. And on a third level it is also the story of how white America regarded black America with implications for how race relations might be today.

To get the usual stuff out of the way, the acting was great, the direction great (with one exception I will get to), the writing fabulous.  Daniel Day-Lewis portrays a Lincoln beset by two goals: to end the bloody Civil war and to end slavery. The South has sent emissaries to sue for peace, but they want to keep their slaves.

Pushing for an end to slavery will prolong a war no one wants. Pushing for an end to the war will leave black Americans in slavery. Accomplishing both goals: an end to the war and an end to slavery will take an amendment to the Constitution, and to get this amendment through Congress will take negotiating, manipulating, horse-trading, and politicking on a grand and inglorious, even criminal, level.  The players in this fascinating drama, particularly Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Hal Holbrook and James Spader, give bright sharp performances, finely nuanced, of real people struggling with complex issues and strong passions.

As well as family life. The thread of Lincoln the family man, with a loyal but over-wrought wife and 2 sons, is nicely woven through the political intrigues. As a father, Lincoln is stern, tender, autocratic, indulgent. The scenes of him waiting with his young son Tad for the result of the congressional vote on the amendment are among the movies most poignant. And of course, for me, who didn't know how the vote turned out, suspenseful.

So we all know how the war ends, how Lincoln meets his end, the triumph and tragedy of that era in US history.  My one quibble with Steven Spielberg, the director, is that he throws in a couple of sentimental scenes that are not needed and that detract from the ultimate true character of the man. Yes, he was noble, but he was also Blagojevichian. That's what makes him, and the movie, interesting.

There is another subtle theme woven through the movie. It is made clear that, except for the black Union soldiers, the war was not fought to free the slaves. The Republicans (republic-ans) were fighting for the Union, for the United States of America. While many were also Abolitionists, not all were. Many, if not most white Northerners, did not believe in the equality of the races, neither Democrat nor Republican. Racism ran deep and one of the major obstacles Lincoln faced in getting the anti-slavery amendment passed was the fears of white Northerners that, once freed, black Americans would want to vote. "In a hundred years" someone hollers. Knowing the history of the Civil Rights movement of the nineteen sixties, that seems a prophetic statement.

There were more casualties in the three days of fighting at Gettysburg than deaths in Vietnam. More men were killed in the Civil War than in all our other wars combined. This is a movie about a facet of this time and it is well worth seeing.