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.
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.
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.
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