Brief note: Lincoln

About midway through Lincoln, I had a disrespectful thought--about the movie, I mean, not the president.  Because it struck me that I had seen the narrative structure before.  And I had: the film is, dare I say it, more than a little reminiscent of the musical 1776. Without the sometimes questionable score, I mean.  Or the puns on adverbs.  And with an assassination.  But both the plot (determined advocate for position X ticks off a lot of people, while everyone jockeys for votes) and one of the underlying messages (history's heroes are, in the end, human beings like everyone else, with all that entails) are the same.  So too is the film's critique of political purism: winning means compromise, even if compromise opens up space for disaster down the line.  (Screenwriter Tony Kushner seems to enjoy needling conservatives and liberals in equal measure.)  In the case of 1776, the compromise--over slavery--is precisely the problem that Lincoln is trying to repair in Lincoln.  Obviously, this is a coincidence, and Kushner should feel free to rage at me if he wants (not that he'll ever see this review).

More seriously, like a number of professional and amateur reviewers, I felt that this film couldn't make up its mind: was it a film about a Great Man or about a post-idealistic politician? As a general rule, Lincoln is much more interesting when it is the latter than the former.  Lincoln raging at his insubordinate cabinet, frustrated son, or unhappy wife, or Lincoln musing over the tension between his oath of office and the technical legality of his actions, co-exist uncomfortably with the Lincoln stared at reverently by his servants and subordinates.  (Gore Vidal's novel Lincoln, which lets us inside Lincoln's head only once, takes a more hardheaded approach: there's considerable fear leavening the reverential lump, as all of the characters slowly realize that, in one way or another, they've deceived themselves about who Lincoln is and what he's capable of doing.)   In particular, the assassination struck me as a structural misstep, not least because of the sentimentalized tableau around his bedside (complete with gentle halo of white light, no less).  We know he's going to die, but that doesn't mean that the film needed to include the assassination (especially not offstage); if anything, moving straight to the second inauguration speech from the amendment's passage would have been more fitting.  Finally, there's the film's odd split between its political rhetoric and what appears on the screen.  On the one hand, some of the politicans (especially Thaddeus Stevens) sound like they've been reading up on contemporary social justice rhetoric; on the other hand, as Kate Masur and others have noted, the film pays virtually no attention to the existence of Black activism in the period--even though two notable activists, the White House servants William Slade and Elizabeth Keckley, are featured prominently in the film! (Masur rightly calls their portrayal here "generic, archetypal characters.")  Only the pointed queries from the soldier at the beginning hint that the Black population was not simply watching from the sidelines.

Comments

[Mr Punch]

I agree with a lot - obviously the movie should have ended before the assassination - but take issue with some key points. First, the thing about Lincoln was that he was both a canny politician and a Great Man; that's the historical fact, and the one that his "team of rivals" came to understand.

Second, I think the criticism about the black presence misses the point. The movie opens with black soldiers bayoneting Confederates - looks like "agency" to me! Shortly thereafter, a black soldier (taking the Frederick Douglass role) tells off the Commander in Chief about unequal treatment. There are many scenes with black troops, a a conversation with a black women who has lost a son in battle.

This movie is about the shenanigans white politicians went through to give blacks the first installment of what they had won on the battlefield - in a sense, the backdrop is a non-Spielberg film, Glory (1989).

[undine]

Good point about 1776, and although I can see where the critics about black activism have a point, there are only so many heroic figures you can fit into one movie even if you're Spielberg. Maybe his next epic will be called DOUGLASS!

It's the first movie I've seen in a theater in 4 years, and I enjoyed it, so I'm not inclined to be critical.

[Contingent Cassandra]

Another, more recent (and also related) parallel might be Amazing Grace, a somewhat sentimentalized/heroicized account of the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade in England. It's been a few years since I saw it (and taught a church class based on it), but the drama definitely revolves around the passage of legislation (which, when you think about it, is quite a trick to pull off), and we get some idea of the human side of our heroes (though perhaps more in the what-they-overcame vein). The trickier thing for me was the emphasis on the Christianity of the heroes (including John Newton); it's not that I (a student of the period and the movement on the American side, and a practicing Christian) don't believe that faith played a large role in the abolitionist movement; I'm just keenly aware that many American abolitionists were at odds with the institutional church, that plenty of slaveowners considered themselves Christians, and that the intersections (and lack thereof) between John Newton's faith journey and his journey toward abolitionism were considerably more complicated than the film suggests.

I haven't seen Lincoln yet, but intend to.