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Daniel Day-Lewis might pick up a third best actor Oscar® for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (cert. 12A), which is also nominated for best film. Certainly Day-Lewis tried to reflect contemporary accounts of Lincoln’s voice as “shrill”, and even in forceful moments it’s not necessarily a voice of authority.
The film begins with a meeting with soldiers as the Union moves to victory over the Confederacy, and one black soldier not readily taking platitudes about post-bellum conditions for his people. Fearful that Congress would not abolish slavery once the southern states rejoined the Union, Lincoln begins pressing to pass the 13th amendment to the Constitution before the war ends.
Most of the film is about wheeling and dealing, corruption even, to secure the two-thirds majority vote needed from Representatives. Having persuaded Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) of the need to do it, Lincoln largely leaves the work to his colleagues and their persuaders, led by WN Bilbo (James Spader).
On the radical side of Lincoln’s Republican Party, Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) was one for whom the war had to mean an end to slavery. However, questions about enfranchisement of negroes, and eventually of women, lay below the surface, and there’s a scene where he has to avoid using the words “racial equality”.
Some of this seems like an episode of The West Wing about a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing, at other times it’s a foundation lesson in modern American history. This includes some of Lincoln’s family issues – his eldest son Robert (Joseph Gordon- Levitt) wanted to enlist but was dissuaded by his father, partly as they’d already lost one son, Willie, to illness.
Sally Field plays Lincoln’s wife, Mary, and their relationship is strained by his stoicism about Willie’s death. Their other son Tad (Gulliver McGrath) was often in child-sized military uniform, an issue that’s played up as Robert prepares to defy his parents.
Little surprises creep in, not least Stevens’ domestic arrangements, and more familiar events are depicted well. The meeting at Appomattox where General Lee (Christopher Boyer) offers the South’s surrender to Ulysses S Grant (Jared Harris) is a good set-piece scene, and the difficulties of reuniting the nation are well trailed.
It’s actually a lawyer’s film, with Lincoln the lawyer explaining how a president’s war powers might subsequently be challenged, and worr ying that his declaration of emancipation might be unlawful. The devastation of the war is never far away, not least in the reaction of the decision to attack Wilmington with a hundred shells a minute; the words “shock and awe” are not used.
It’s not heavy with lessons to be learned, but it is didactic. Its success as a film does rather depend on how credible Day-Lewis is as Lincoln – enough for the Oscar I expect. Next week: Zero Dark Thirty, Katherine Bigelow’s fact-based story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, covers torture, the efficacy of torture, and the persistence of one female CIA operative to locate the hiding place of “UBL”. The final reel includes a reconstruction of the raid on his compound, and you can imagine yourself in the White House ops room watching events unfold.
Steve Parish