Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s commanding biopic about the 16th president, has been scheduled to open three days after the election—probably so that Spielberg, a deep-pocketed Obama backer, can’t be accused of trying to swing the election for the first African-American president. On the other hand, holding up the release may have been good for Obama. Covering the last three months of Lincoln’s life, the movie shows the president and fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives struggling to pass the Thirteenth Amendment over the vociferous opposition of Democrats. If Lincoln had come out earlier, Mitt Romney would probably have blamed Obama for slavery.
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I would never have expected this lesson from Spielberg, a sentimental man who numbers the mythmaking John Ford among his cinematic heroes. Ford did more than any other filmmaker to enshrine Lincoln as a saintly rustic, most memorably in the classic Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), and Spielberg seems to follow his lead in the first dialogue scene of Lincoln. Visiting Union soldiers in the field, the commander in chief (Daniel Day-Lewis) squirms in modesty as two grunts recite the Gettysburg Address, and after they’re called away, a beaming black soldier proudly supplies the last few lines (“. . . that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth”). As history the scene is defensible—Lincoln’s poetic, 272-word speech was widely printed in newspapers and immediately recognized as a rhetorical marvel—but as drama it’s atrocious, a smarmy Hall-of-Presidents moment.
The legality of Lincoln’s situation was complicated, a hard thing to explain onscreen, and Spielberg was wise to tap a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist as his screenwriter instead of some Hollywood hack. Kushner resorts to one of the oldest expository devices in movies—the “man with a pointer scene,” which refers to those old war movies in which an officer stands before a map, outlining the plan of attack—but the monologue in which Lincoln presents his dilemma to the cabinet is wonderfully lucid and compact. With the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Lincoln had unilaterally freed Southern slaves, arguing that, as commander in chief, he was entitled to seize them as the property of a hostile nation. Yet this extraconstitutional gambit was based on two intolerable suppositions—that slaves were property and that the Confederacy was a nation. As a legal argument against slavery, Lincoln admits, the proclamation was built on quicksand.
Lincoln manages to encompass many aspects of the president’s last three months: his arguments with his unstable wife, Mary Todd (Sally Field); his determination to keep their eldest son, Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), out of uniform; his grief over the recent death of their 11-year-old son, Willie, and the thousands of other sons taken by the war; his magnanimous friendships with the former political enemies who joined his cabinet; and of course his assassination (which Spielberg ingeniously represents with a scene from a children’s play). But making the amendment battle the spine of the story has allowed Spielberg to present Lincoln simultaneously as someone very simple and very complex. It reintroduces us to the man we all met in grade school—the one who freed the slaves. But it also reveals what he had to do to engineer such sweeping social change, affording us a more grown-up education.
Directed by Steven Spielberg
