The Better Angels

In Abel Gance's monstrous and great epic film, the nine-year-old Napoleon organizes the students in his dormitory into military phalanxes.  When the boys stage a pillow fight, it looks like Austerlitz.  Later a snowball fight seems to involve hundreds of combatants and complex flanking maneuvers.  Exhausted by the battle, the future man of destiny curls up to sleep on a cannon with a sentinel eagle guarding him.  With histrionic intensity, Gance insists that character and deeds of the future emperor are prefigured in the events of Napoleon's childhood.  In every respect, The Better Angels, a film about the boyhood of Abraham Lincoln, asserts a proposition precisely opposite to that dramatized in Gance's Napoleon (1927).  In The Better Angels, Lincoln's childhood on the frontier is shown to be almost completely uneventful -- it takes an attentive viewer 20 minutes (and the film is only 95 minutes long) to figure out which barefoot urchin is Abe Lincoln.  In fact, I don't think Lincoln's name is mentioned more than two or three times in the film.  There is something perversely heroic about the film's refusal to suggest that the core of Lincoln's greatness can be traced to his childhood.  Exemplary is a scene in which the boy encounters slaves.  Lincoln's brutal and indifferent father has sent the twelve-year old on an overnight trek to a tannery.  The boy sleeps in the open in the woods and is awakened by chains clanking.  Some ragged and battered-looking slaves stagger by led by a couple of white men.  Lincoln looks at the slaves who gaze at him with numb incomprehension.  There is no dialogue, no exposition, and the film maker doesn't even supply us with a reaction shot showing the boy.  Lincoln doesn't mention the incident to his father or stepmother and it is never mentioned in the dialogue.  Indeed, the film has almost no dialogue -- most of the movie consists of rapturous shots of natural phenomena:  trees and thunderstorms and creeks flowing between rocks, a turtle that boys capture and a large praying mantis that Lincoln's mother cradles in her hands.  About a quarter of the shots in the movie are taken looking up toward trees, capturing the fall of the sunlight through the canopy of the forest.  People wander through radiant-looking and dewy meadows collecting flowers.  On the soundtrack, we hear the sounds of the forest and classical music:  Mahler, Dvorak, Wagner.  From time to time, we see Lincoln or his father plowing, people drawing water from a well and the rough-looking interior of the log cabin where the people huddle together.  Dennis Hanks, a contemporary of Lincoln, narrates -- but mostly his commentary is about boyhood games and sicknesses that suddenly kill adults and children:  about a third of the way through the movie, Lincoln's beautiful and beloved mother dies (from "milk sickness") and is buried in rude casket.  We see Lincoln reading in a book by firelight and there is lots of log-splitting.  The film has no narrative, tells no story, and proves no points.  The design of the movie and its structure is like a parody of Terence Malick's recent films The Tree of Life and To the Glory -- there is a whispered voice-over, mostly transcendental musings or unanswered metaphysical questions, gorgeous (in this case black and white) nature photography, and somnolent characters standing in open fields or groves of tall, noble-looking trees. (Malick produced the film and its director A.J. Edwards has worked as a second-unit director on a number of the film makers recent pictures). The people are all movie-star handsome; the women wear neo-classical white gowns and look like Greek goddesses.  The tone of the film is expressed by the opening epigraph:  "Allthat I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother."  And, the film suggests that Lincoln was lucky to have two angel mothers -- first his natural mother who dies half-way through the picture and, then, his stepmother who seems to love him just as much as her own children and is uniformly kind and generous to him -- she isn't much older than the boy, but in her Grecian costume, his stepmother seems like a miraculous being from another world.  There are some beatings administered by Lincoln's father, but they are brief and not too savage -- we see a dignified Indian who helps to build a fence and a school master who speaks like Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Someone says that Lincoln was always "memorizing speeches by Henry Clay" but we don't ever see him reciting these speeches.  The dialogue and narration in the film is epitomized by a cousin, Dennis Hanks' voice-over saying:  "She (Lincoln's mother) was working all the time -- she didn't have much time to contemplate the Glory."  This film is a curious, frustrating, mostly tedious enigma -- if Lincoln's childhood was an idyll of nature worship and pantheism, then, how did he become a great lawyer and warrior and leader of men?  We see him wrestling a little bit and he seems a good sturdy lad but we have no sense at all of his inner nature or his character or hopes and dreams.  Among the stolid, ignorant peasants, Lincoln's mother can't read and his stepmother may also be mostly illiterate -- and his father is certainly illiterate -- the young Lincoln doesn't stand out and seems no different from those around him, only  a handful of people since the film takes place entirely in the remote wilderness in 1819.  The child Lincoln doesn't seem to age or grow -- we see several seasons pass but the boy doesn't change.  In a brief coda identified as Easter 1865, we see the same tiny and deserted cabins, the same old growth forest with the light falling through the trees and hear the same rustling leaves and wind with distant thunder.  The shots are all still lifes without people. The narrator says that he went to Lincoln's stepmother to tell her -- the assassination is only obliquely mentioned:  "I went to tell her.  They killed him.  I knew they would kill him.  She didn't say much.  I guess she was expecting to see him soon."  And, then, screen goes black.

After watching the film, I spent a half-hour on the internet trying to figure out the identity of the people in the film and some of the movie's historical sources.  I suppose it is a testimony to the picture that I was sufficiently interested to do this research.  But it is also noteworthy that to understand the film and the relationships of the people in it, I had to undertake this study.