Spielberg, Day-Lewis, and "Lincoln": My (Re)View

          Steven Spielberg's just-opened treatment of the Lincoln myth stars Daniel Day-Lewis.  Both director and star are given to excess, so it may come as a surprise that this marriage is not a strained struggle of over-sized egos.  Instead, Lincoln is an important film that covers the political maneuverings that led to the passage of the 13th amendment outlawing slavery and takes place in about a thirty-day period in early 1865.  More, it is an eerily photographic treatment that seems taken out of the pages of Civil War photojournalism. 
          However, if Lincoln is an important and beautiful film, it isn't nearly as good as a movie.
          The chief reason for this is its unrelenting barrage of talk.  Tony Kushner's first version of the screenplay ran to an unheard-of 500 pages, which he whittled down to about 130 pages that unreel in two and a half hours.  The length would not have been a problem had it not been for a serious imbalance between talk and action:  there isn't much motion in this motion picture.
          Making matters worse for the audience is that the characters, although based on real people , are mostly unknown today.  We do not automatically know what their political positions were, what the congressional alliances looked like, or even why all the northerners did not have similar thoughts about a constitutional  amendment to outlaw slavery.  Nor are we in on the political dialogue or even the vocabulary of the time; the very words “Republican” and “Democrat,” and the parties they represent, are roughly opposite to their modern counterparts.  

           Lincoln's own political and moral positions are also hard to pin down because the film doesn't show how he had morphed from a Colonizationist (in favor of relocating slaves back to Africa) to the author of the Emancipation Proclamation and the engineer of the 13th Amendment.
           Not all of Kushner's words are political, however.  Just to break things up, there are occasional passages between Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln in marital strife--words about her madness, their dead son Willy, and their relationship.  The Abraham vs. Mary drama is loud, but not character-revealing.  One would have to go into the movie theater with knowledge of Mary Lincoln's fragile mental health and her conniving, free-spending excesses to make sense of it all.  And it is in one single scene, where the Lincoln marriage is shown at its worst, that we get Daniel Day-Lewis, who in the rest of the film is Oscar-good, resorting to the screaming school of overacting that mars his worst work, as for example in Gangs of New York.
          In short, Lincoln is too long, too wordy, too politically indecipherable, and it is hurt rather than helped by the beautiful photographic stills that don't take enough advantage of the cinema as a motion picture art form. The film may be personally inspiring, morally uplifting, historically accurate, and beautifully shot, but as a movie, it's too talky and preachy.  Amazingly, Spielberg has managed to make Lincoln the man and Lincoln the movie both tiresome and boring.

Death, Curiosity, and the Ascent of Man

          Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945 and on August 6th that same year, his successor Harry Truman authorized the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.  Three days later a second bomb was exploded over Nagasaki.  Together these bombs effectively ended hostilities during World War II--but Franklin Roosevelt never knew who won the war or how it ended.            

          On April 14, 1865, five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant, thus ending the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated--without ever knowing how the post-war peace would work out, what America would look like after the long war that claimed 625,000 American lives, both Blue and Gray.

          My father died in 1970 without knowing if I would finish graduate school with the Ph.D. I was working on at the time and that I would finish seven years later. 
          This goes from the sublime to the ridiculous, but it points out that we are all destined to die without knowing the outcome of something important to us at the time of our death--and that used to trouble me no end.
          The more I think of it, however, the less it troubles me.  And the reason is because the history of mankind is different from and greater than the history of men.  Collectively we have come a long way--scientifically, technologically, and artistically--since our first ancestors began walking upright about six million years ago, just yesterday compared to the four and a half billion years the planet has been circling the sun.
          During our six-million-year history, we have made spectacular advances that have rightly been described as the Ascent of Man--and yes, thinking metaphorically is one of the advances of our species.  In spite of the daily headlines and those who see us as a depraved race of sinners, we should be proud to be human, proud of our species, proud to take our places on the planet for the few years we have. 
          So what does it matter in the end that we will not know at our deaths exactly how our children's lives will work out, what our reputations will be in the future, whether we will be remembered at all, or how long the republic will last.  This is our common destiny.  But in the larger view there is consolation in the knowledge that we have added a little of ourselves to the working out of human history, for every life in its own peculiar and tiny way changes the universe.   

          Seen from that angle, our lives have meaning, and it is our duty to do something with them, to make our contribution, no matter how small, to the Ascent of Man--even though we are destined to die without knowing how it will all turn out.  It is together, collectively, that we as a race of thinking men, homo sapiens, make our mark on the universe.  It's an uplifting thought, better than heaven.