by TOM MACKAMAN
Directed by Steven Spielberg, written by Tony Kushner
Lincoln, which will be released in theaters nationally November 16, is a powerful cinematic treatment of the Lincoln administration’s struggle to pass a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery in 1865, the final year of the American Civil War.
The film centers on the period of the “lame duck” Congress in early 1865, the fourth year of the Civil War, after the electorate had handed Lincoln and the Republicans a crushing victory in the 1864 elections over the Democrats, who opposed emancipation. It follows the political struggle to pass the Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives—it had been passed by the Senate the previous year—amidst deep war-weariness in the North and against the backdrop of a mounting sentiment in favor of a negotiated peace with the South within the Republican Party itself.
The screen is populated by real historic figures, first and foremost Lincoln, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Also present are First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Field), Congressman and radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn), conservative Republican Francis Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook), New York City “Copperhead” Democratic politician Fernando Wood (Lee Pace), Union general Ulysses S. Grant (Jared Harris), Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens (Jackie Earle Haley), and many, many others.
The considerable strength of the film, directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Tony Kushner, rests in its detailed presentation of the extraordinary history surrounding the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. This took Kushner beyond the work of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincoln biography Team of Rivals, upon which the film is partly based.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Kushner acknowledged several important sources, including James McPherson’s magisterial Battle Cry of Freedom, writings on Lincoln by Alan Guelzo, and Lincoln’s own letters. The filmmakers have paid careful attention to historical accuracy, from lighting (the film attempts to recreate the sort of oil-based illumination of the day) to language (much of the dialogue is selected from the historical record, including speeches from the floor of the US House of Representatives.)
The film brings Abraham Lincoln to life in a way that comes close to Karl Marx’s unsurpassed description of the man. Lincoln was a figure, Marx wrote, “neither to be browbeaten by adversity, nor intoxicated by success, inflexibly pressing on to his great goal, never compromising it by blind haste, slowly maturing his steps, never retracing them, carried away by no surge of popular favor, disheartened by no slackening of the popular pulse, tempering stern acts by the gleams of a kind heart, illuminating scenes dark with passion by the smile of humor, doing his titanic work as humbly and homely as Heaven-born rulers do little things with the grandiloquence of pomp and state; in one word, one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good. Such, indeed, was the modesty of this great and good man, that the world only discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr.”
Much of the credit for recreating this Lincoln must go to the extraordinary efforts of Irish-born actor Daniel Day-Lewis. In his performance, Lincoln appears to deliberate carefully about every word, always ahead of his interlocutors, thoughtfully assessing the political meaning hidden behind their positions. Lincoln comes across as both a shrewd politician and a leader whose policies were ultimately rooted in principle—above all else, the principle of equality.
“We began with equality, that’s the origin isn’t it? That’s justice,” the film has Lincoln say in an obvious reference to the Declaration of Independence. Day-Lewis manages to fuse the politician—Kearns Goodwin’s rather narrow focus—to the principled man “never compromising … by blind haste, slowly maturing his steps, never retracing them.”
Day-Lewis is facilitated by Kushner, who must be credited for allowing Lincoln’s own words to form much of the script. The film opens with Lincoln near a battlefield meeting Union soldiers, white and black, who together recite to him his already famous Gettysburg address, and its assertion that the war was for “a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
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