Lincoln

Lincoln – The problem with Steven Spielberg’s impressive and scrupulously researched film about the passage of the 13th Amendment is exemplified in a brief sequence about two-thirds of the way through the 2 ½ hour film. Lincoln’s eldest son wants to enlist in the army. Mary Todd Lincoln, still beset by grief over the loss of her son Willy, is horrified at the possibility that Robert will be killed in battle. She enlists Abe to persuade against volunteering in Grant’s army. Lincoln takes Robert, a sensitive lad, to a military hospital, apparently specializing in amputations. Robert knows that his father is trying to dissuade him from enlisting and refuses to go into the hospital ward, which turns out to be far less noisome than the viewer expects. On the street in front of the hospital, Robert sees two orderlies pushing a wheelbarrow that is dripping blood. He follows them, and in a wholly predictable scene, discovers that the wheel barrow is full of amputed arms and legs which are cast in a pit full of a couple dozen grey-green severed limbs. Robert is appalled and sickened. And, yet – and this is the flaw in the film – the revelation has no effect on him. He enlists in the army anyhow. So the scene is essentially pointless. On a larger scale, the entire film embodies the problem demonstrated by this vignette. Spielberg’s film is a product of the partisan gridlocked politics of our last decade. He shows us a world in which everyone makes brilliant and floridly ornamented speeches, in which great orators orate, and yet no one is convinced. Tony Kushner’s highly theatrical script – the film is a series of aphoristic debates – shows people who are locked into their convictions and, simply, can not yield to one another. Presumably, this is how Spielberg sees politics – one side is invincibly right and convinced of its rectitude; the other side is horribly wrong and equally convinced of its rectitude. No one compromises and all the picturesque and eloquent speech is so much empty wind – it fills up the sails of the ship, but the vessel doesn’t move. It can’t move; it is anchored by fixed, immutable convictions. Spielberg and Kushner probably thought that they were making a paean to democracy, but the essence of the film is anti-democratic. All the deliberation in the world can not sway anyone from their immutable convictions. Lincoln gathers enough votes to pass the Amendment, but this is not accomplished by convincing people to change their mind. The votes are acquired by the most obvious forms of chicanery, by bribery, and by threatening those weak enough to be intimidated. At one point, Lincoln lies about the presence of a peace embassy from Richmond; he uses a contorted legalistic parsing of words, the sort of dishonest literalism of Bill Clinton’s “it depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is” – not surprising considering Spielberg’s affection for that President. This is a profoundly disheartening view of the political process if, perhaps, accurate. Lincoln is limited in its focus to the struggle over the 13th Amendment – there are some superfluous, if emotional and highly charged, scenes with Mary Todd Lincoln, played fiercely by Sally Fields, but those aspects of the film don’t contribute to its main thematic emphasis. Spielberg and Kushner haven’t figured out how to create Shakespearian sub-plots that echo and comment on the main action. Lincoln’s marital problems are an appendix to the film and don’t have anything to do with its main subject. The movie, as one might expect, looks splendid – a series of dark interiors portrayed with the rigorous geometry and precision of Thomas Eakins – indeed, many of the friezes of male faces in the parliamentary scenes quote Eakins’ various operating theaters and portraits. The acting is uniformly superb. Daniel Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is completely plausible, although the film, as seems inevitable slips into mere hagiography every ten minutes or so. (The hagiography like much of the picture is exceedingly predictable – the scene where the black soldier recites the Gettysburg Address, for instance, is telegraphed in advance and, often, the viewer can predict the next sentimental shot in the sequence; Spielberg, who plays to the least intelligent member of the audience, tends toward too many reaction shots to guide the viewers’ reception of the material.) The script is very clever and quotable and an early account by Lincoln of why he needs the 13th Amendment to be passed before the end of the war is the best history lesson on this subject that I have ever had. But it pains me to say that, given the gravity of the subject, the movie is not as good as it needs to be. The vulgarity of some aspects of the movie is startling – do we really need a scene of black men fighting white men in mud, complete with one man’s face being ground into the mud by another man’s boot? Was Thaddeus Stevens’ fiery abolitionism motivated by his sexual relationship with his housekeeper? There’s not a lot of nuance in scenes of this kind and, again, there is a tendency in current Hollywood productions toward a particularly cruel and heartless cynicism, that is, the reduction of all human motivation to its most base level. Probably, the worst charge you can make about this picture is that, in certain scenes, it devolves into the pretentious platitudes of Ken Burns, surely a film-maker who never saw a pious liberal cliché that he didn’t immediately, and enthusiastically embrace. And this, of course, raises another concern: How has Steven Spielberg, possibly Hollywood’s greatest entertainer, devolved into the rather stolid, dutiful mere educator on display in this film.