Steven Spielberg has captured beautifully the war-ravaged time of Lincoln and the improbable story of the waning days of the Civil War and the 16th president's life.
Some films remind us of the past. Some films bring the past to bear upon our own times. Few have the power to impart the spirit that was upon our fathers. "Lincoln" does.
Not one of us will know the pressure that Lincoln did, but the lesson of taking a bird's eye view on our lives is priceless for overcoming fear and anxiety -- no matter how small the issue is.
Lincoln is a classic that will stand the test of time. It will be a monument to the talents of Spielberg, Kushner, Day-Lewis and Field. Though it won't appeal to all, it will appeal to the ages.
Based on a portion of Team of Rivals, by presidential historian Doris Kerns Goodwin, the movie is a well-documented telling of the passage of the 13th Amendment. It wasn't pretty!
Memo to President Barack Obama from your powerful friends in Hollywood: You are the president of the United States, clothed in immense power. Now use it. That, at least, seems to be the message of Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's surprisingly riveting examination of the 16th president's campaign to persuade that unruly collection of hicks, fanatics and thieves known as the House of Representatives to pass a Constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. Lincoln's Republican party outnumbered their Democratic rivals, but Constitutional Amendments require a two-thirds majority. So the challenge was to keep the Republican caucus in line and pick off about 20 votes from the other side. And so the arm-twisting began. If that sounds familiar, it should. It's reasonable to think that this film couldn't and wouldn't have been made at any other time.
Why does Lincoln never get dated? Why can his story be told again and again, and never seem to wear out its welcome? I think it has something to do with how visceral our needs are for equality -- equity in opportunity, justice and dignity.
As a look into how politics worked in the mid-1800s, and of course how it still works today, Lincoln is surprisingly funny and endlessly compelling. But the need to create a defining portrait of our sixteenth president creates both needlessly solemn subplots and some narrative repetition that prevents true greatness.
Lincoln may be what America needs right now to remind us what politics, for all its messy, dispiriting ugliness, can and should be about -- doing the right, moral thing to better us all.
Don't know much about history -- but you don't have to in order to be captivated by Steven Spielberg's Lincoln.
