![]() Field, especially, has trouble finding the center of gravity for the slightly loony Mary Todd Lincoln. Grant.īut Sally Field and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as Lincoln's wife and eldest son, never really get their footing. ![]() ![]() Tommy Lee Jones, as the Pennsylvania "Radical Republican" Thaddeus Stevens, is up to the task, with his wrinkles and wigs and wry, watchful manner Jared Harris makes a third-act appearance, puffing on a cigar and bringing a battleworn wisdom to the part of Ulysses S. Perhaps it's the alchemical way the actor gets under the skin of his character, but Day-Lewis' channeling of Honest Abe makes everyone else's job all the more challenging. The president was, by history's accounting, a wild man of a storyteller, and there are wonderful scenes here where Lincoln veers off on colorful narrative jags, regaling soldiers, or telegraph operators, or members of his cabinet, or his wife, with metaphoric rambles whose implications are not always clear. This is one of Spielberg's key achievements: that he introduces a gang of boisterous, contentious statesmen, pols, and lobbyists (William Seward, Thaddeuus Stevens, Edwin Stanton, Preston Blair ) and manages to keep track of who they are, and how they are allied with, or opposed to their president.īut " Lincoln" is also a human story, and Day-Lewis, armed with Kushner's eloquent prose, brings his subject to life with grace, humor, and soul. With a screenplay by Tony Kushner, adapting Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln," the film masterfully captures the dual dilemmas facing the president in the final months of his life: how to bring the war between the states to an end and heal a broken land, and how to eradicate slavery, once and for all.Īnd though his goals were lofty, the country-lawyer-turned-commander in chief was savvy enough to know that deals needed to be made, scores settled, patronage jobs promised, if he was to win over the anti-abolitionist Democrats in the House of Representatives.Īnd so, " Lincoln" is as much about the process of our political system - then, and (yes) now - as it is about the people who preside over it, who manipulate it, try to master it. " Lincoln" begins with bayonets and mud and muskets, soldiers of the Union and the Confederacy in close, miserable combat, but for the most part, the action in Spielberg's handsome piece of history is verbal, emotional, electric. And Lincoln's determined campaign to outlaw the trade in human beings ("If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," he wrote) is being thwarted by a recalcitrant Congress. The Civil War has taken hundreds of thousands of lives. In " Lincoln" - Steven Spielberg's penetrating portrait of a nation's leader at a moment of epic crisis - Daniel Day-Lewis delivers an utterly extraordinary performance, his voice aquiver, his body angular but pliant, moving with a creaking, spongy gait down the corridors of the iconic residence on Pennsylvania Avenue. His house is the White House, and the wraith is Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States. ![]() ![]() Tall and bent, his shoulders wrapped in a wool throw, he's a chilling figure in a cold, dark house. A bearded wraith, his brow etched with deep grooves, skulks around in the dead of night. ![]()
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