Every new Steven Spielberg movie is an event for me; I consider him to be the greatest American filmmaker of our time.  Spielberg’s best films have an immediacy that brings magic to our mundane reality, and which bring the unbelievable to vivid life.  So imagine my surprise when I saw Lincoln.  As a history lesson regarding the unlikely passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, it serves a valuable function.  I expect high school history classes of the future to view this as a matter of course.  But I must admit to being incredibly disappointed by the film as a work of entertainment.

Spielberg has proven in the past to be able to blend history and entertainment in dynamic proportion, proven by his many awards and accolades for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.  But Lincoln lacks the immediacy and impact that makes those films so powerful.  Lincoln, even with the superb talent of Daniel Day-Lewis as our sixteenth president, utterly fails to excite and occasionally fails to stir much interest.  Some humor leavened throughout the story helps, and a strong sense of who Abraham Lincoln was in the final months of his life is achieved.  But Lincoln the man really isn’t the focus, which I think is why I didn’t really appreciate it.

My own poor memory of American history certainly lessened the movie’s impact.  I remember William Seward as the man who negotiated the purchase of Alaska (“Seward’s Folly”) and Ulysses S. Grant as a notoriously rakish general who, after the Civil War, became our eighteenth president.  But I admit to being totally ignorant regarding the cast of Civil War-era politicians who battled back and forth over the imminent dissolution of slavery.  The movie made it difficult for me to keep track of who was important, and in what ways, and why.  Tony Kushner’s screenplay is surely intricate in its language and dialogue, yet the vast amount of political gamesmanship simply overwhelms the human elements of the story.

I also feel that Spielberg failed in one other capacity.  Looking back one hundred and fifty years with the hindsight of historical perspective, we view slavery as a heinous evil that simply had to be eradicated.  Watching the politicians of the era fight against such righteousness causes bafflement because they seem to have no sensible position on which to stand (other than the commercial benefit, which is mentioned regularly). The screenplay should have offered explicit reasons for some states’ delegates in the House of Representatives for voting against the Amendment, or shown iron-willed political opposition to letting Lincoln have his way on the matter.  Because the drama is depicted from Lincoln’s perspective, and because we already know the outcome, there is little dramatic arc to the debate.

Lincoln isn’t a bad film.  It has decent acting, especially from Day-Lewis, and from Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, a headstrong abolitionist.  But it isn’t the defining portrait of Honest Abe for which I had hoped.  The family drama that surrounds him involving his wife (Sally Field) and son (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is lackluster at best.  Much of the political maneuvering doesn’t involve Lincoln at all. This movie should have been titled something like Battle for Equality because that is its central theme, not the life and times of Abraham Lincoln.  Some viewers and critics see the film as a metaphor for our current political gridlock, and that it argues for a dynamic arbiter to cleave a path to prosperity.  That’s as may be, but even a metaphorical work should be more dramatically engrossing than this was.  ☆ ☆ 1/2. 27 November 2012.