Daniel Day-Lewis stars as President Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s drama.  Source:  Supplied

What film about Lincoln would be complete without the log cabin in Kentucky where Abe was born, or sweeping battle scenes of the Civil War to rival the burning of Atlanta? What film would pass over the reading of the Gettysburg Address, perhaps the most famous political speech of all time, or Lincoln’s assassination by the racist fanatic John Wilkes Booth in a Washington theatre?

We see none of these things in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Instead we are given an epic talkfest, focusing on the last four months of Lincoln’s life and the political shenanigans that led to the passing of the 13th amendment to the US constitution, outlawing slavery in 1865. Spielberg has sacrificed action, spectacle and visual grandeur to concentrate on the minutiae of political argy-bargy. The result is a dry, sombre, long-winded film, in its way utterly compelling – Spielberg’s strangest and bravest achievement, and his finest film since Schindler’s List.

Spielberg first contemplated a Lincoln biopic 10 years ago and asked playwright Tony Kushner to work with him. It seems Kushner came up with a 500-page screenplay that would have been more than enough for a long-running miniseries. But Spielberg liked the last 80 pages dealing with the passage of the 13th amendment, and that became the movie. The final screenplay, based partly on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals, deals not only with Lincoln but with the disparate bunch of loyalists, friends and envious go-getters who made up his cabinet.

The film’s supreme asset is Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance, which for power and verisimilitude ranks with Meryl Streep’s Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. It may seem absurd for someone in the 21st century, with no memory or special knowledge of Lincoln, to pronounce on the character’s authenticity. But it is a measure of the greatness of Day-Lewis as an actor that even the most bizarre and unlikely aspects of the man ring true. This may not be exactly what Lincoln was like — who knows? — but it is exactly what we think he was like: a gaunt, lonely, rather awkward figure troubled by doubt and conscience. Lincoln was 193cm tall — a remarkable height for a man in the 19th century — and, wearing his familiar stovepipe hat, Day-Lewis makes him look comically stooped and lopsided. The voice, often thin and reedy, as if strained by exhaustion, could assume a firmness and authority in the heat of an argument. Spielberg likes to circle Day-Lewis in close-up, as if defying audiences to spot a telltale mole or scar that would destroy the illusion of reality.

We are offered a pensive Lincoln, given to flashes of humour and playfulness — a Lincoln who likes crawling around on the floor of the White House with his youngest son, or exasperating his cabinet colleagues (some of whom are polite enough to laugh) with anecdotes about his days as a lawyer. In the same breath at cabinet meetings he will expound in detail on the legal intricacies of his plans for constitutional change; I have heard no more dense passages of argumentative dialogue in a Hollywood film.

There are touching scenes with his wife, Mary Todd (the excellent Sally Field), in their rare moments of repose. He quotes Shakespeare; in another scene, alone with his telegraph operator, he muses on the axioms of Euclid, as if they afforded a logical proof of the iniquity of slavery: “Things that are equal to the same thing must be equal to one another.” And in his lighter moods he plays the fool. I loved the scene at a flag-raising ceremony after his second inauguration when he produces a speech from under his stovepipe hat, unfolds the paper, reads the speech and returns the paper to its hiding place – all in public view. It is impossible not to care for such a man.

Lincoln is a film about the day-to-day mechanics of politics – those realities we think of as vaguely disreputable, but that ultimately determine how great issues are decided. This is the world of compromise and negotiation, of wheeling and dealing, of vote-counting, of backroom boys practised in plotting and conspiracy. Spielberg must have known, when he made Lincoln, of its uneasy parallels with modern US politics.

Like Barack Obama, Lincoln lacked a majority in the House of Representatives: he needed the votes of wavering Democrats to pass his amendment, much as Obama today needs the votes of wavering Republicans. His key ally was Thaddeus Stevens, a leading abolitionist and radical Republican (played with gleeful intensity by Tommy Lee Jones), who is persuaded, with difficulty, to distinguish between racial equality and equality for blacks before the law – a fine point that, in a world where parliamentary debate actually counted for something, was enough to make a difference.

But Lincoln still had problems with dissidents on both sides, and one solution was bribery. There are fascinating scenes when William Seward, his secretary of state (David Strathairn), assembles a team of political operatives to offer inducements to wavering Democrats: government jobs, handouts, favoured treatment for relatives. Among the team is William N. Bilbo (James Spader), a whiskered dandy in purple waistcoat who is not above using four-letter words. When the votes are counted in the house on that fateful January day, the scene has all the suspense of a crime thriller. Spielberg has us on the edge of our seats – along with those cheering blacks in the public gallery. The game changer comes when representative George Yeaman of Kentucky (Michael Stuhlbarg) gives an exultant “Aye” to the abolitionist cause. But where, ask the doubters, will it all end – with voting rights for blacks? With votes for women?

Spielberg and his cameraman, Janusz Kaminski, have shot in subdued light, with silhouetted faces and candlelit interiors. Most of the film takes place on the floor of the house. I counted only two, perhaps three, outdoor sequences – a brief, opening skirmish between black Union soldiers and southern whites, and Lincoln’s visit to the corpse-strewn battlefield at Petersburg, Virginia, reminiscent of the post-battle carnage in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. How easy it would have been to include grand vistas of the Capitol, urgent horse-riding sequences, battles and mighty crowd scenes. A graphic reminder of the horrors of slavery – a touch of Django Unchained – might not have been out of place. We hear a few words of the Gettysburg Address recited in Lincoln’s hearing by a young soldier, but that’s all. As for the assassination, Spielberg treats it almost as a vulgar distraction from his main purpose. We are given a scene in another theatre, where Lincoln’s 12-year-old son Tad is in the audience. Suddenly the theatre manager rushes on stage to announce, “The president has been shot.” And what might have been an anti-climax is all the more poignant for Spielberg’s restraint.

Lincoln succeeds because Spielberg portrays his subject as a politician, with all a politician’s flaws, and not as a god-like being. Although he hated slavery, Lincoln was a late convert to the cause. He was not elected on an abolitionist platform and, in his first term, with the aim of keeping the slave states in the Union, he steered clear of abolition, promising slave owners would be compensated if ever their rights were diminished. Nor was he the first president to espouse abolition. John Quincy Adams had proposed an amendment to abolish slavery in 1839, but nothing came of it.

In the last resort, however, nothing can diminish Lincoln’s achievement. He won the war, he saved the Union, he freed the slaves. And he grasped that none of those aims could be accomplished in isolation. In the words of George McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972, whose short biography of Lincoln I recommend: “There has never been an American story like Abraham Lincoln’s.”

One day, perhaps, a filmmaker of genius will tell the whole story. For now, we have Spielberg’s brilliant, forensic dissection of a crucial part of it. Lincoln is not to be missed.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/spielbergs-lincoln-is-brave-and-utterly-compelling/story-fn9n8gph-1226573343554