Presidential Decree

Last night, I went to see Steven Spielberg' newest film, the historical drama Lincoln. It boasts an epic cast and an epic run time, though the film itself is actually rather narrow in narrative scope.

The film purports to be based in part on the biography Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Having read that book myself, I must say that's a tenuous connection at best. The biography is a sprawling tome that covers every facet of Lincoln's election and presidency, while going into great length about his prominent cabinet members as well. The film, of necessity, must pare that down somehow, and does so by focusing almost entirely on the month of January 1865, and the push to pass the 13th Amendment to end slavery in the United States.

Much of the movie feels like an 19th century version of The West Wing, and there's good reason for that. The creator of The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin, had a background in writing plays before coming to television, and crackling dialogue was second nature to him as a result. The screenwriter of Lincoln has had even more success on the stage than Sorkin did; Tony Kushner's Angels in America was a huge success. And his forays into film writing have been infrequent enough that he still maintains that theatrical element in his work.

The movie does manage to make great, tense drama out of political coercion, vote counting, and bargaining, giving just as much space to oratory as it does depictions of the Civil War. The throughline in both depictions is showing the human cost -- the lives lost on the battlefield, and the lives impacted by the decisions of lawmakers. This means Lincoln himself isn't in every frame of this ostensible biopic, and that's a good decision.

In fact, I might have been tiring ever so slightly of the depiction of Lincoln by the end of the movie. It's well documented that he was a man with the right story for every occasion, but this is demonstrated perhaps once or twice too often in the film. It's good writing to reveal a character to an audience through example; it's bad editing to repeat the examples more than necessary.

But then, it may have been hard to decide just which story could have been the one to leave on the editing room floor, because Daniel Day-Lewis is compelling in every moment of the film. It's a step above good acting where you can "see how the wheels of thought are turning" in the character's mind; here, you can sense the thinking going on, but also get the sense that the thought process is too sophisticated to fully comprehend -- as sometimes said of Lincoln himself.

Of course, Daniel Day-Lewis is just the leader of an immense cast, all of them excellent. Sally Field, David Strathairn, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, James Spader, Hal Holbrook, Tommy Lee Jones, John Hawkes, Jackie Earle Haley, Jared Harris, Lee Pace, Walton Goggins, and more are here. People you'd recognize line up to have just a single sentence of dialogue on the screen. (As an aside, if you're a longtime Denver area resident that has attended theater at the Denver Center Theater Company, you might recognize older company veterans John Hutton and Jamie Horton.) Everybody wanted to be a part of this.

Since this movie is getting some decent Oscar buzz, I feel obliged to say that I didn't like this film quite as much as Argo, my own personal front runner so far. But this is certainly a worthy contender, and could speak to this being one of those occasional golden years that delivers several quality films to battle for the honor. I give Lincoln an A-.