Alright. I finally saw it. Note: there were a full half-hour of previews before the feature began, and mean a full 30 min. I was wearing my indiglo Timex watch.
I'll stay clear of any major revelations for members who might still see the movie, but this the SOH membership, so I feel I can safely assume the majority of you will know the basic facts surrounding the US Civil War. The official government name for the conflict is The War of the Rebellion. President Lincoln was an lawyer by trade, and part of the way he justified his assumption of truly imperial war powers is by denying to existence of the Confederate States of America as a legal entity. That way, he could point to "inherent" powers of the Chief Executive in times of "insurrection or rebellion". In the South (even now) the war was called The War for Southern Independence, or The War of Northern Aggression. This is important in the film, as it was in history. Mr. Speilberg does not (to his credit) try to film the entirety of Doris Kearns Goodwin's rather long book, Team of Rivals. Instead, the film begins after Lincoln has won his second term as President, and the Federal Army is mustering for its assault on Wilmington. In a single sentence, the film is about how President Lincoln, with the aid of a cabinet whose every memeber believed they would make a better president than he, forged the coalition to push the 13th Amendment through a factious lame-duck Congress.
Daniel Day Lewis' portrayal of Abraham Lincoln is different than any I've seen before, and I've seen lots, including the Hall of Presidents at Walt Disney World. I'd say the closest would be Sam Waterston's portrayal in the TV movie based on Gore Vidal's Lincoln. The stentorian voice we see in almost ever movie on this subject is gone, replaced by a (yes) higher-pitched midwestern twang. His movements are (there's no other word for it) gangly, a folksy version of Ichabod Crane. I saw Doris Kearns Goodwin on television over the weekend, and she maintains that this was him, according to every eyewitness description. Lincoln is also portrayed as very funny. I laughed out loud on more than one occassion, as did everyone else in the audience. What really surprised me was how funny Tommy Lee Jones' portrayal of "radical" abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens was. I had always pictured Mr. Stevens as a very severe fire-breathing type, which is sometimes, in the movie, but he's just as often laugh-out-loud funny. I would suppose these men would have to develop a very strong sense of humor just to handle what they were dealing with. There's a brutal hand-to-hand combat scene at the begining of the movie, followed by a very clever recitation of the Gettysburg Address by federal soldiers. There's also a limb dump outside an Army hospital being visited by President Lincoln and his oldest son Robert - not a body dump - a mass grave just for severed limbs. This film will be nominated for Academy Awards in Production Design, Costumes, and Cinematography, but I have no idea as to what it will win.
I don't see how the film, witihin its time constraints, could have been any more comprehensive. As it was, it ran two hours and forty minutes, but I do have my quibbles. This doesn't particularly bother me; picking nits is part of the enjoyment for me. IMO the film does a good job of portraying the interests of the various members of Congress who have to be wooed, bribed, or intimidated into making Emancipation. It does an especially good job in capturing the panic experienced by certain of the participants at the prospect of ex-slaves obtaining the vote, which they view as a thin-entering-wedge ending in all sorts of ungodly, anarchistic nonsense, like suffrage for women. Not trying to be funny here. See the movie; this is what they say. One scene that doesn't appear that I'd have liked to have seen is "Why did John Wilkes Booth kill Abraham Lincoln?" That is not a rhetorical question. One of my quibbles is how Lincoln is repeatedly told how much and how deeply he is "loved" by the people, when the truth was he was loved by some of the people, and just as equally despised by others, and I'm talking about Northerners here.
Sally Fields' Mary Todd Lincoln is perhaps the most sympathetic protrayal of this very troubled person I've seen in a movie. She had several very serious problems, such as blinding migraine headaches, dizzying mood swings, bouts of depression (as did Lincoln) and appears to have been what today would be called a "shopaholic" which any of you who've ever met one know is a very serious disorder in and of itself. One year I heard a very persuasive argument on C-SPAN2 that Mrs. Lincoln was suffering from a particular form of diabetes that was poorly understood at the time. I took care of a cancer survivor who was also diabetic and who became more and more demented as she aged, so I was paying very close attention, but a whole slew of my relatives picked that moment to drop by, so I never got the name of the author.
I think that's enough, until more members have had a chance to see the movie.
JAMES
PS Another note: at my local multiplex, Lincoln was playing on a single screen, while Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 2 was playing on four. I don't know what that means, if anything.
