{"id":418,"date":"2012-11-14T20:01:25","date_gmt":"2012-11-14T20:01:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=418"},"modified":"2016-10-10T21:29:10","modified_gmt":"2016-10-10T21:29:10","slug":"spielberg-kushners-more-perfect-lincoln","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=418","title":{"rendered":"Spielberg & Kushner’s More Perfect “Lincoln”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lincoln<\/a><\/p>\n

Lincoln<\/em> \u2013 (IMMEDIATE REACTION: And what if last week\u2019s election had gone the other way? Would that 13th Amendment have been repealed? Oops. Spoiler\u2026Sorry about that, those-of-you-who-slept-through-high-school-history\u2026.)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Race prowls, growls and snaps along the edges of Steven Spielberg\u2019s Lincoln<\/em> as it never could throughout the recent political campaign. And to briefly digress, the evasions have only gotten worse since last Tuesday. So far, no one in what Sarah Palin and I love to label the \u201clame-stream media\u201d wishes to acknowledge the specter of racism in these calls for secession <\/a>by spoilsports in Texas and elsewhere. I\u2019d like to believe, as Lincoln<\/em> widens its presence in the Great American Multiplex, that the neo-Victorian lummoxes now wasting their energies on the Petraeus-Broadhurst Misadventures will be compelled by the movie to see this neo-Confederate furor as the maypole-dance-for-bigotry that it is. But as a good friend of mine sadly reflected today, it would have been nice to think that last week\u2019s election results meant we\u2019d finally put away all our childish things.<\/p>\n

As vital as I think Lincoln<\/em> is to generating a more perfect discourse on race and union, I think the movie\u2019s gradual release better facilitates such maturity. A more big-footed nationwide bust-out of any Spielberg movie conditions audiences to expect pyrotechnics and razzle-dazzle, if not dinosaurs and aliens. This is a deliberately-paced, serious-but-not-altogether-solemn epic that needs all of its 150 minutes to convey the urgency, languor and ultimate viability of the democratic process. If Steven Spielberg\u2019s showmanship can\u2019t make compelling cinema from material as multi-layered as Doris Kearns Goodwin\u2019s Team of Rivals<\/em>, nothing can. It can, and does.<\/p>\n

(And, for the record, boys and girls, there are plenty of dinosaurs and exotic beings in this one as well, if only metaphorical ones. You\u2019ll see what I mean.)<\/p>\n

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\"lincoln-movie-iii\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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As with Amazing Grace<\/em>, Michael Apted\u2019s handsome, relatively neglected 2006 movie about Britain\u2019s abolition of slavery, Spielberg\u2019s Lincoln<\/em> isn\u2019t about African American rights so much as it is about politics itself, and how time, personality, and the velvet-fisted power of persuasion can converge to bring about epochal, seemingly miraculous transformation. Abraham Lincoln\u2019s efforts to pass the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery (little noted and not as long remembered as the Emancipation Proclamation) provides a surprisingly wide lens for viewing the contradictions and complexities of both the Republic and its haggard-but-dauntless leader in the final months of its greatest crisis. Among the many small miracles wrought by Tony Kushner\u2019s script (and the movie is as much Kushner\u2019s as it is Spielberg\u2019s, maybe more) is its seamless compression of the personal travails of its protagonist with the brilliant calculation of his maneuvering. You\u2019d have to know going into the theater that, however much the movie is packaged as civic education, you\u2019re not going to visit a stone edifice. You\u2019d also have to know that Daniel Day-Lewis, whose preparation is so diligent and fertile that it can sometimes spill onto the scene, nails down everything there can possibly be about Lincoln\u2019s voice and physical movement, even the way he nestles against his sleeping youngest boy, to leave little or no doubt that this is how \u201cour one true genius in politics\u201d (vide<\/em> Robert Lowell) really behaved in sorrow, anger and, most tellingly, in jest. (Would it really ruin things for you if I disclosed that Lincoln tells a dirty joke in the movie? Or would it make you more curious? Either way, I\u2019m not sorry. At least I didn\u2019t tell the joke.)<\/p>\n

As good as Day-Lewis is, it\u2019s not as dominant a performance as you might expect — or dread. Tommy Lee Jones, that proud son of the once-and-future Republic of Texas, dines robustly on scenery as the Pennsylvania abolitionist congressman Thaddeus Stevens, treated so shabbily by D.W. Griffith in Birth of a Nation<\/em> and here given some of the better lines not assigned to Lincoln himself. Sally Field\u2019s Mary Todd Lincoln, though nowhere near as edgy as Mary Tyler Moore\u2019s version in the 1988 TV mini-series version of Gore Vidal\u2019s Lincoln<\/em>, is as persuasively grounded as she is borderline hysterical. Everyone else, from Bruce McGill and David Straithairn as cabinet stalwarts Edwin Stanton and William Seward, respectively, to a near-unrecognizable James Spader as ringleader of Lincoln\u2019s back-ally lobbyists, makes vivid use of on-screen time, even Lee Pace as the flamboyant Copperwood Democrat Fernando Wood who wanted New York to secede and Justified<\/em>\u2019s peerless Walton Goggins, his wormy magnetism on that show checked here in the role of a tremulous fence-sitting Democrat fiercely tugged by both sides in the amendment debate.<\/p>\n

And what about the African Americans? Well, as seems customary in the aforementioned lame-stream, they talk less here than they are talked-about. Gloria Reuben\u2019s Elizabeth Keckley, dressmaker and \u201cconfidant\u201d to the First Lady, is permitted here to ask Lincoln the question most black people are more likely to ask of him now: How, Mr. President, do you really<\/em> feel about us? Mr. President finesses the answer in the movie with precisely the same ambiguity with which he dealt with the race question all his life. (He was never as ambiguous on slavery itself. The distinction isn\u2019t as clear here as it perhaps should be, but it\u2019s there.) David Oyewelo, as one of the black Union soldiers speaking directly with Lincoln at the movie\u2019s beginning, is far less credulous, peering at the president\u2019s amiable fa\u00e7ade with visible skepticism over its owner\u2019s commitment to that \u201cnew Birth of Freedom\u201d cited at Gettysburg months before the movie\u2019s story begins.<\/p>\n

But if black people aren\u2019t as conspicuous as whites in Lincoln<\/em>, race, as noted earlier, rages insistently throughout,\u00a0stalking\u00a0the historical figures like a rough, fearsomely mythological beast whose presence drives everyone\u2019s actions, even \u2013 especially \u2013 the hesitation or outright refusal to act at all. And the movie is not the least bit shy implying that it is hysteria towards the very idea of \u201crace-mixing\u201d rather than the dark race of the despised minority itself that is most complicit in the Civil War\u2019s bloodshed. Nowhere is this made more visually striking than after the unsuccessful attempt by Confederacy vice-president Alexander Stephens (Jackie Earle Haley) and his \u201ccommissioners\u201d to retain slavery as a prerequisite for a negotiated settlement between North and South. The impasse fades to the image of a city in flames illuminating the night, followed by a gloomy ride by Lincoln and assorted military officers through a sooty, corpse-riddled battleground in Virginia. At such a point, those familiar with Lincoln\u2019s life and words might be inclined to think of\u00a0his 1858 speech in Edwardsville, Illinois when he dares to ask whites about dehumanizing and subjugating blacks: \u201cAre you quite sure the demon which you have roused will not turn and rend you?\u201d<\/p>\n

I bet Tony Kushner knew that speech. I\u2019m also betting that Kushner, who\u2019s on-record defending Barack Obama\u2019s circumspection and cool resolve against the dismissive criticism from Kushner\u2019s left-wing allies, worked on this screenplay over the past few years with the intuitive sense that the 44th president\u2019s struggles to finesse necessary transformation against ferocious and, at times, irrational opposition mirror those of the 16th president. Such perception gives his script a breadth, passion and level of commitment rivaling those of his stage work, notably, inevitably, Angels in America<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Lincoln, as the film takes pains to point out, is not perfect \u2013 and neither is Lincoln<\/em>. Its ending comes across as Spielberg\u2019s surrender to the temptation of making things obvious to the audience. It needed to end a few minutes earlier. (No, not this time. See for yourself.) Still, though we\u2019re all in dire need of remedial history and (God knows) civics, Lincoln<\/em> arrives not as a $50 million classroom lecture, but as a deeply enthralling diorama of tragedy and triumph bridged by the worst (avarice, bigotry, meanness of spirit) and best (equanimity, perspective, the enduring power of the open mind) from our many selves. And in case I didn’t make it clear at the outset, I\u2019m as surprised by all this\u00a0as you are \u2013 or will be.<\/p>\n

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\"lincoln<\/a><\/p>\n

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Lincoln \u2013 (IMMEDIATE REACTION: And what if last week\u2019s election had gone the other way? Would that 13th Amendment have been repealed? Oops. Spoiler\u2026Sorry about that, those-of-you-who-slept-through-high-school-history\u2026.) Race prowls, growls and snaps along the edges of Steven Spielberg\u2019s Lincoln as it never could throughout the recent political campaign. And to briefly digress, the evasions have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124],"tags":[99,98,105,101,95,97,100,106,93,102,96,103,94,104],"class_list":["post-418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-13th-amendment","tag-amazing-grace","tag-barack-obama","tag-daniel-day-lewis","tag-david-oyewelo","tag-david-straithairn","tag-emancipation-proclamation","tag-gloria-reuben","tag-lincoln","tag-sally-field","tag-steven-spielberg","tag-tommy-lee-jones","tag-tony-kushner","tag-walton-goggins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=418"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1687,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions\/1687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}