Lincoln – Review

If you were making a film and wanted to put together an all star cast where would you start?  Every film needs a good director so let’s get Steven Spielberg on the project.  As for who to star in the film?  Let’s take multiple Acadamy Award winner Daniel Day-Lewis to take point.  Then, for good measure, throw in Tommy Lee Jones, James Spader, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and David Strathairn as supporting characters.  As this film is set in the 19th century, Sally Field makes an excellent addition as well.  Combine all of this into a film about one of the most revered people in American history and you are surely destined for success.  Enter Lincoln.

Aside from the amazing personnel attached to the product, one of the major reasons why Lincoln is so powerful is because Steven Spielberg was smart enough to know that it would be foolish to turn this into any sort of life-long biography.  Instead, the film begins well into the American Civil War and focuses almost entirely on the debate over the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

At this time the Emancipation Proclamation had already been issued granting freedom to Southern Slaves.  However, President Lincoln understood that this decree would not last much beyond the war and therefore a more permanent solution was necessary.  He also understood that with the backdrop of war consuming almost all aspects of life, when it came to getting the Amendment passed, timing was everything.

Steven Spielberg obviously knows how to make movies.  Daniel Day-Lewis is obviously a talented actor.  The movie is very well done and will surely be watched for many years to come in homes, classrooms, and other settings.  From a historical perspective, the great efforts made to get enough votes for the Amendment was interesting.  From a personal perspective, President Lincoln’s burning convictions and tremendous personal work to try and correct this great wrong was extremely touching.

Perfection, however, is a difficult task.  Though smart enough to forego most of Lincoln’s earlier Presidency (and life in general), for some reason the film wanted to keep going long after the Amendment passed.  The celebrations after getting it passed should have served as the perfect ending to a film that was focused on that.  Instead, as if to explain some great mystery that had yet to be discovered by the masses, the film decides to continue on and detail the end of the Civil War and even President Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s theater.

It’s not as though these elements aren’t important, but they don’t have to do with what the film was about.  Those elements would have been much more appropriate if Lincoln had been some mega-biopic chronicling President Lincoln’s entire life.  Luckily, the major story the film wanted to tell is already over by that point so these extra elements aren’t very distracting.

Abraham Lincoln once wrote that “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”  It has been a long time since we have had politicians who were so willing to stand up for principle above politics.