Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Tommy Lee Jones, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, James Spader, Hal Holbrook) – This is a perfect movie. Steven Spielberg has outdone himself. His Schindler’s List is a classic and the direction seemed very personal and mission-driven. Saving Private Ryan was wonderfully bloody and realistic but took on too much scope. Lincoln is awesome.
Daniel Day-Lewis inhabits this larger-than-life character with an Academy Award-winning caliber performance that transcends incredible. He was over-the-top magnificent in There Will Be Blood. Here, he is so layered, moving from soft-spoken to deliberate to funny to brooding to bombastic. This is the Lincoln we all feel like we know from history and also the Lincoln we never knew. He is a visionary as well as a storyteller. He is manipulative and calculating. He is loving and distant.
What a supporting cast! I did not think that Sally Field would be inspired casting but she is wonderfully flawed as Mary Todd Lincoln. She is troubled bordering on depressed. Torn by the death of her son, she challenges her husband, who we find out considered committing her to an institution at one point. The marriage is not intimate but it is not loveless. One of the best parts of the movie comes when the President admits that he grieves internally while his wife just can’t move on.
David Strathairn, too often not listed among America’s best actors, gives life to Secretary of State William Seward. Seward, intensely loyal to the President, never leaves Lincoln’s side despite his considerable reservations about passing the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery when peace may be at hand. But he is the architect for garnering the votes he needs from the Democrats to go along with his fellow Republicans. Seward enlists a small group of operatives, led by W.N. Bilbo (James Spader in a sparkling performance as the clown with a larcenous heart), to offer patronage to Democratic Congressmen who were voted out of office in the recent election.
Tommy Lee Jones, as Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, is cast perfectly as the Republican chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. He has long been the leading proponent of emancipating the slaves but fails to be drawn into the rancor, using his wit, experience, and a few falsehoods to twist arms.
Hal Holbrook plays Preston Blair, one of the founders of the Republican Party and elder statesman who becomes Lincoln’s emissary to the Confederacy. Joseph Gordon-Levitt portrays Abe and Mary’s son, Robert, who feels compelled to join the Army against his parent’s wishes so that he can feel relevant. John Hawkes (Oscar-nominated for Winter’s Bone) and Jackie Earle Haley (Oscar-nominated for Little Children) play Bilbo’s compatriots.
While the film could have suffered from ignoring virtually all of Lincoln’s first term, it lasers us into the period immediately following his second election. While enormously popular, Lincoln has his best chance to pass the landmark Amendment but could lose a real chance at peace. Spielberg’s choice to focus on this period through Lincoln’s assassination was risky but genius. He does justice to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book without bogging us down in the “team of rivals” theme of the biography.
If I had one criticism – and it is really just my preference (and what do I know?) – it is the way Spielberg handled the ending. I won’t write more about that. But when you see it, ask the question of whether the film needed to go as far as he did. This is hardly a knock on the film. It is a tribute to this much-heralded director whose deft hand has managed to tell stories better than any filmmaker since Hitchcock.
Take the kids to see how a perfect film can give a history lesson while keeping you on the edge of your chair. It will make you laugh, cry, cheer and cry again as it tells the story of perhaps the greatest American in history.