MAN AND WIFE Sally Field and Daniel Day-Lewis star in ‘Lincoln’.
One president, one month, one amendment
Cinema
Daniel Carey
THE opening credits of ‘Police Squad!’, the TV series which inspired ‘The Naked Gun’ trilogy, featured Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln. The short clip showed Lincoln returning fire after a bullet struck his hat.
According to the DVD commentary, ABC’s entertainment president Tony Thomopoulos said: ‘Police Squad!’ was cancelled after just six episodes ‘because the viewer had to watch it in order to appreciate it’. What Thomopoulos meant, according to Wikipedia, was that the viewer had to pay close attention to the show in order to appreciate it – something it has in common with Steven Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’.
Despite the title, this is not a biopic, but a political drama focusing on a month in the life of the eponymous character (played brilliantly by Daniel Day-Lewis). Set on January 1865, it details Lincoln’s attempts to have the House of Representatives pass a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.
Based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book ‘Team of Rivals’, ‘Lincoln’ is a fascinating mix of idealism and pragmatism, straight talking and double dealing, the ancient and the modern.
Some of what’s depicted seems a world away – the brevity of political speeches (one Lincoln speech runs to a single page), the easy access to the president (a couple show up at The White House to petition him personally) and the lack of security around him (in light of how his life ended, you can’t help but notice how exposed he is when out and about). Suggestions of votes for Negroes (or, heaven forbid, women) are met with horror.
Yet those who have even a passing interest in American politics will see parallels with the 21st century. The House of Representatives is described as ‘a rat’s nest’ full of ‘talentless hicks and hacks’. The president is offered a 19th-century version of what the CIA would call ‘plausible deniability’, and at one stages gives a ‘lawyer’s dodge’ worthy of Bill Clinton. There are question marks over the constitutionality of some of his signature achievements, plus a sharp two-party divide.
Needing 20 votes from opposition Democrats in addition to the backing of his own Republican party, Lincoln resolves to get them by hook or by crook – mainly by promising people jobs.
This is a film with intellectual heft. Lincoln’s summation of why his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation may be insufficient to protect slaves in peacetime requires the audience’s full attention. Easier to follow, but still complex, is the request that ‘radicals’ (such as Thaddeus Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones) deny their long-held belief in full racial equality, lest such notions frighten those whose votes can’t be guaranteed.
Stevens’s debate with Lincoln is a masterclass in ‘hope and change’ versus ‘the art of the possible’, but there is humour too. Stevens has a quiver full of memorable put-downs for political opponents. He calls a Mr Wood a ‘perfectly-named, brainless, obstructive object’. Lincoln is full of aphorisms and has an anecdote for every occasion. “I could write shorter sermons, but when I get started I’m too lazy to stop,” he says at one point.
The president is continuously trying to steer a path between competing goals. His son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) wants to join the Army but his melancholy wife, Mary (Sally Field), who has already lost one son, is horrified by notion. He wants peace and a constitutional amendment but ‘can’t have both’, Secretary of State William H Seward (David Strathairn) tells him.
Tony Kushner’s screenplay – dismissed by some as ‘people in rooms talking’ – means ‘Lincoln’ unlikely to become a huge hit at house parties. But it did the trick for me.
Rating 8 out of 10
