I finally saw the film Lincoln this week.  Since I am an American historian who actually teaches a class on the Civil War, my tardiness on this bit of film-going might qualify as a professional embarrassment or even a dereliction of duty.  However, I am here to vow that in the future I will try to become more responsible on such matters.

Thus, my analysis:  the film is significantly flawed and everyone should see it because it is excellent.

If that sounds a bit like I am from Kentucky, trying to support both sides of the war, so be it.

I’ll give you what I truly loved about the film now and save its flaws for my next post:

1) Daniel Day-Lewis is brilliant as Lincoln.  His Lincoln was the most compelling Lincoln I have seen, a folksy Midwesterner with a high-pitched voice whose hidden depths of calculation, intelligence and resolve led others to underestimate him, as was true of the real Lincoln.  Several times I consciously asked myself whether this Day-Lewis was the same grizzled oil man who sat in a saloon barking, “I drink your milkshake!” in There Will be Blood. I do need to confess, though, that I developed some affection for Day-Lewis’ Lincoln because his wry humor, gentleness and patience reminded me of my Unkenholz uncles from North Dakota.  (That is correct.  My mother’s maiden name is Unkenholz, so I have Unkenholz uncles.)

2) The material components of the film effectively transport one back to the world of 1865 Washington D.C.  The over-stuffed Victorian furnishings, the muddy roads, the telegraph wires nailed to posts hanging above the politicians in the war room, and so much more.  In one scene Seward wears a yellow silk Japanese robe, even though only a handful of people know he was an avid collector of Asian artifacts.  Nice touch.  The principal characters look remarkably like their historical counterparts:  Stanton, Seward, Gideon Wells, Mary Todd, Robert and Tab Lincoln.  For instance, check out this “Slate” article comparing the film characters to their real counterparts.  (They didn’t quite capture the stunning ugliness of Francis Preston Blair, Jr., though.  Maybe this was out of respect to

Daniel Day-Lewis or Abraham Lincoln? Only his hairdresser knows for sure.

Hal Holbrook.)  Steven Spielberg makes great use of Day-Lewis in profile, often in silhouette, where he looks strikingly like the Lincoln images we are all so deeply familiar with. (I should point out that the material elements are the easiest parts of a historical film to get correct.  Getting the beards and doorknobs right do not make a film historically accurate, as some people think, but they do make one feel historically embedded, which is something.)

3)  The film wonderfully captures the deal-making, logrolling, posturing, compromising, horse-trading politics that we get in our American democracy.  It is a bit over-dramatized, but that is what helps make it hit home.  A friend from church remarked that she realized from the film that politicians are politicians and that what we get in Washington today is not new.  Yup.

4) The film gives us a good dose of the human dilemma of how to fight for high ideals in the midst of a fallen world.  It seems that Spielberg ends up supporting a Machiavellian stance that one has to play dirty and corrupt in order to bring about noble accomplishments. I have a problem with that theologically and historically, but since my understanding accounts for the grace of God in human affairs, I don’t really expect Spielberg to get that.  What he does get is how difficult the dilemma can be.  I had tears in my eyes when Thaddeus Stevens found himself struggling to decide whether he should reign in his long-standing rhetoric of racial equality in the hopes that it would help the pragmatic goal of passing the amendment to end slavery.

5)  Finally, I do not wish to go on record as an avid supporter of tearing others apart, but I can’t help but admire the finely flung insults in this film.  Eloquence at least takes some of the malice out, if for no other reason that one is rather impressed by the cleverness of the thing.  Two cheers for the insulting political oratory in Lincoln, then.  I was reminded of that master of the English-language insult, William Shakespeare.  From King Lear, Act II, Scene 2:

“A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of thy addition.”

You should see the film.  And read my next post as to why it is flawed.