The movie follows Abraham Lincoln and the men he’s deputized
as they attempt to pass a Constitutional amendment banning slavery. (The Constitution as originally ratified
didn’t explicitly permit slavery but didn’t prohibit it either, and implicitly
made it legal, by admitting the states in which it was incorporated into
law.) Obviously it is worth watching. Whether it’s fatally flawed by its treatment
of race and its depiction of slavery as an issue that primarily concerns white
men, I don’t know. I tend to have low
standards when it comes to how politically complete and accurate historical
films should be. You can read other
people’s writing on this topic and make your own decision.
The film is directed, as everybody knows, by Steven
Spielberg, from a script by Tony Kushner.
It’s supposed to follow Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, about the political rivals who got together within
Lincoln’s presidential administration, but apparently draws on only four pages
in the middle of that book. Several
other historians are credited as consultants, as well, some of whose
contributions (like those of James McPherson) seem fairly obvious. The rivals who play such large roles in
Goodwin’s book do all make appearances here, and in important positions, but
they don’t necessarily get large amounts of screen time. And one of the big revelations of her book
was that Lincoln suffered from dejection and spent a lot of time reading his
Bible, neither of which fact makes any appearance onscreen in Spielberg’s film
at all.
Tony Kushner has worked with Spielberg before, on Munich, which he co-wrote with Eric Roth,
but he’s best known for the two-part play, Angels
in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Angels
in America uses techniques that in a novel might be called magical realism
to explore AIDS and the history of Jewish and homosexual life in the United
States. On the one hand, Roy Cohn, a
historical figure, former deputy to Richard Nixon and persecutor of the
Rosenbergs, and a closeted gay man, is dying of AIDS. On the other, Prior Walter, a true-blue WASP,
is coming to grips with his recent diagnosis.
In between are Joe Pitt, a Mormon lawyer and disciple of Cohn; Louis Ironson,
who leaves Prior because he’s unable to deal with illness, and then takes up
with Joe; and Belize, Prior’s friend and Roy Cohn’s nurse. The conceit of the angel is that God has,
literally, absconded, leaving a gaggle of angels (in the tradition of Milton
and Blake) unable to cope, unable to perform their usual bureaucratic
functions. The angel America brings a
revelation to Prior, in his illness, telling him to stop trying to change the
world. He refuses it.
Theater is often inaccessible, and large-scale visual
effects can be expensive to produce.
Except for the HBO version of his play (directed by Mike Nichols from a
script by the playwright), Kushner’s brand of magic has been hard to find. Lincoln,
especially near the beginning, evokes some of the same magic Kushner brings to
the theater. This is interesting,
because there is probably no movie director who is less theatrical—in the sense
of being theater-like, play-like—than Steven Spielberg. No one leaves a Spielberg movie saying, “That
was okay, but it was really too much like a play.” No one is leaving Lincoln saying this, either.
But it’s nice that the Kushner sense of visionariness, which is much
more personal and cerebral than Spielberg’s sense of magic, made its way onto the
screen, at least a little bit.
This is probably the first digital Civil War film. The crudeness of everything was emphasized:
the shaggy hats, the obviously homemade uniforms, the sense that everything the
government and army were using had been jerrybuilt for the purpose a very short
time ago. High-ranking army officers tip
their chairs back on two legs, in a way I learned from the books I read as a
kid was considered a sign of uncouthness.
The President drinks from a tin cup.
You know that when you watch a movie directed by Steven Spielberg,
you’re going to get a good story and a good visual experience, and Lincoln does not disappoint.
I didn’t think Daniel Day-Lewis looked like Lincoln, and
this bothered me, probably more than it should have. He was not nearly gaunt enough. Spielberg plays this as if the infamous
presidential super-accelerated aging process, always especially noted in regard
to Abraham Lincoln, applied only to the last month of his presidency. In fact, though, Lincoln was gaunt throughout
his life. Day-Lewis looks well-fed and
self-satisfied. He doesn’t look like
Lincoln—he looks like Arthur Miller, or better, like Leonard Bernstein. But really, who he looks like is Daniel
Day-Lewis. He looks like a movie
star. It can be annoying when a
historical movie casts the main character with so much regard for personal
likeness that acting ability is disregarded, but reworking a historical drama
so that the central personage can fit some kind of charismatic ideal tends to
be a bad sign.
Day-Lewis is surrounded by a bevy of stars and well-known
performers who are more or less character actors, or what passes these days for
character actors: Tommy Lee Jones (who is good but whose character is
excessively marked by, alternately, his hick accent and diction and the
viewer’s remembering that he graduated from Harvard), David Straithairn (in
other words, Edward R. Murrow), Sally Field (Norma Rae), Jared Harris (the Brit accountant on Mad Men, playing Ulysses S. Grant).
They circle around the President, pursuing their own agendas, but always
deferring to him. At times, not always
obvious times, the film recalls Walt Whitman’s idolization of Lincoln, in poems
like “When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloomed,” an elegy written in the wake of the President’s death. They, in turn, are surrounded by a mass of
little-known actors who look like ordinary people, real Americans, even
nineteenth-century Americans—whose motives tend to be more petty, who aren’t very
interested in big ideas or in political movements, and who have to be persuaded
one way or another to link up their personal destinies to the cause of
Abolition.
I can’t help but compare this vision of how political change
is made with Kushner’s own account, in an essay published with Angels in America, of how little is ever
accomplished by one person alone, how any accomplishment worth anything is
always a group effort:
“The fiction that artistic labor happens in isolation, and
that individual talents are the sole provenance of artistic accomplishment, is
politically, ideologically charged and, in my case at least, repudiated by the
facts. . . . The smallest indivisible human
unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction.”
I can only half-reconcile this essay with what I saw on the
screen in Lincoln.
The movie was marred, for me, by Spielberg’s usual crude,
mechanistic use of Christian imagery, which he makes use of as if it were
something he had to have, to please the crowds, as much as music by John
Williams or big sweeping panoramas. When
Thaddeus Stevens pretends he doesn’t believe all races were created equal, but
only that there should be equality before the law (something that apparently
did not really happen), solely in order to win votes, his opponent has to jump
up and use the word “deny.” The moment
this happens, you just know it’s going to happen three times. Otherwise, how could there be a parallel
between Stephens and Peter's denying Christ after the latter’s arrest? But this parallel does nothing. There’s no reason for it: no reason why this
particular character should be compared with Peter, and no reason why this
particular point of the story of Lincoln
should be linked to Peter’s threefold denial of his friend and his God. It’s there to say something about The
Universality of Myth, yada yada yada, this is a Christian country, where gospel
stories are shared by all of whatsoever creed, so a story is made more resonant
and “deeper” if it’s associated with Christian narratives.
I said that nobody is going to leave the theater after
watching Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln,
saying, “That was too much like a play,” but actually, there is one play it is
very much like: the 1967 musical, 1776
(made in 1972 into a film—badly butchered, incidentally, in the broadcast
television/VHS version), about the proposal and ratification of the Declaration
of Independence. Even more than Lincoln, 1776 focused on the wheeling and dealing needed to get a
legislature to take action: in the case of 1776,
to persuade the delegations of all thirteen colonies to the Continental
Congress—at a time when New England, New York, and New Jersey were the ongoing
sites of battle, but many still hoped for reconciliation—to agree to declare
their independence from Great Britain.
There are a number of parallels. The
plots of both Lincoln and 1776 are in large part stories about
persuading legislatures to vote a certain way.
The sharp-tongued Thaddeus Stevens is mocked by his Southern colleagues
in the same way as the “obnoxious and disliked” John Adams. The debate over the morality of slavery is
portrayed as an essential element in the legislative process, in both cases, as
(according to 1776) Jefferson edits
his draft of the Declaration to remove language condemning the Atlantic slave
trade, as the price of securing the agreement of the South, and as (in a
musical number that can be viscerally upsetting if done right) Adams is
reminded that Massachusetts is home to the ships’ captains who carry on that
trade and bring back the profits that follow upon it.
And the question whether this is really the last legislation
needed, ever, on this and related questions, arises in both. There’s a sense in which the characters
naturally feel something like, “This is the one big fight. All we have to do is get this piece of
legislation passed, and we’ll already have achieved our goal.” In the case of the Thirteenth Amendment,
viewers certainly know that a long subsequent struggle was needed, and that the
struggle still is incomplete. Any sense,
which a viewer might feel on leaving the theater, that the story is over and
won, is clearly illusory. In 1776, this is signaled more within the
story, as the elation of having the Declaration in large part accepted is
punctured, as delegates make specific objections to the text—not least to its
mentions of slavery—and it is watered down.
In Lincoln, though it isn’t
always in the foreground, when it is, it makes the story feel very ironic.
If Lincoln makes a
specific political point, one that’s relevant to our own times, beyond "racism is bad," I’m not sure I could
say what it is. But it’s a pretty good
movie, and it’s almost certainly going to be a staple of high school history
classes for many years to come.