Lincoln [150 points / 15 votes]
"Steven Spielberg is, of course, probably the most well-known filmmaker since Alfred Hitchcock, but he’s never been one who was much concerned with tapping into the zeitgeist. He might more accurately be described as one who created his own zeitgeist in terms of funneling his movie-fed, entertainment-oriented obsessions into fodder for the popular consciousness, which was then eagerly processed by audiences worldwide.
Of course that’s something different than how Robert Altman or Martin Scorsese, to name two ‘70s directors who operated concurrently with Spielberg in his young prime, often felt their way toward subject matter that could ignite emotions and intellectual compulsions which may have been lying dormant in the audience or have already existed outside it in the political or social realms. In that light, I’ve come to think of Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and even Amistad as Spielberg’s op-ed films. They were all designed to illuminate some of the director’s concerns and spark discussion beyond goggle-eyed accounts of stratospheric, record-shattering earnings, but they did so from within a sort of protective bubble of history meant to bolster perspectives on the Holocaust, the Greatest Generation, or the ruinous origins of slavery, courting affirmations which already felt culturally pre-approved, sealed in amber.
Munich was messier, more complicated, perhaps even slightly screwed-up, morally. Its ambitious attempts to connect up events surrounding the pursuit and elimination of the men responsible for the assassinations of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games with the world we live in now made it seem wobbly and queasy in a way that actually served the movie’s nerve-jangling subject matter. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that both Munich and the ostensibly more conventionally-mounted Lincoln were written by playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America, Homebody/Kabul); if so, it’s a happy one. Both movies deal with the necessity of moral and political compromise, both feature a nimble sensitivity toward dialectical debate in its fulfillment and its inadequacies, and both screenplays seem to have inspired Spielberg to work outside his own comfort zone and reach for something tangible in the material that might elevate each movie out of the realm of the well-meaning museum piece.
Lincoln is, of course, an epic story of moral unrest, political machinations and the weary death rattles of civil war, conjured without the conventions of an epic palette -- the expansive consciousness of David Lean made to serve a confined template of dimly-lit quarters and crowded congressional chambers in which Altman would have thrived. (Both Altman and Spielberg have always shared a fondness for the cacophony of crowds and overlapping conversation.) What Lincoln is not is, in the strictest sense, a biopic. Based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Spielberg restricts his perspective to the last months of Lincoln’s life, with the beleaguered president embroiled in struggles to corral and manipulate myriad conflicting, belligerent, slippery, conniving and stubborn personalities -- in his cabinet, in Congress, and even in his own family -- on the way toward pushing through the 13th amendment to the Constitution: the abolition of slavery.
The brilliance of what Spielberg, Kushner, the masterful film editor Michael Kahn and the top-to-bottom marvelous cast have done here is exemplified in the way that the movie, which is easily the tightest and most crisply focused of the director’s career, manages to avoid the crippling claustrophobia that could have been brought on not only by the near-exclusivity of its interior settings but by the daunting minutiae of the language and its distant political context. The deftness with which that language flows and becomes meaningful is a tribute to Kushner, but also to the cast, populated by actors like Tommy Lee Jones, David Strathairn, Sally Field, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Walton Goggins, Michael Sthulbarg, Jared Harris, Tim Blake Nelson, John Hawkes, Bruce McGill and especially James Spader -- all exceptional and capable and rarely given this kind of chance to shine, and who all convince us not only of their specific roles in the crucial political scramble but also of their essential humanity, their unpredictability, their own moral wavering and convictions. And as Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis is simply (and I mean that in the sense of being unadorned) brilliant at exuding the confluence of this revered president’s stubborn facility for manipulation and his penchant for folksy wisdom; for articulating with forcefulness and subtle humane appeal his convictions and his uncertainties; and the weariness in his personage that is only the smallest of costs he will have to pay for shepherding a nation through a moral crisis of unprecedented magnitude. Day-Lewis is so good in fact that several reviewers initially marveled at how he was even able to replicate the reedy, casual jocularity in the president’s voice, quite an achievement considering no one alive today has ever heard what Lincoln actually sounded like.
Through no apparent contrivance, Lincoln looks at last to be Spielberg’s real zeitgeist film. It has already appealed to a huge and somewhat unlikely cross-section of the domestic mass audience. And the movie appears at a moment in modern history in which the nation is more profoundly divided and divisive than it has been since perhaps the time of the Civil War, distrustful of and damaged by the eroding expediency and culpability of the political process -- a nation led by a president who must himself find some way to marshal his own stubbornness and his own moral compass past the political hubris of both parties, and the lingering specter of racism, in order to lead a sea change of effective legislative reforms on a particularly controversial aspect of the American lifestyle. It is also not insignificant that the course of the history of the United States since the 13th Amendment officially legislated the abolition of slavery has made possible the election and re-election of that president, a man who 148 years ago would have been considered property. Such modern resonance isn’t what makes Lincoln a great American movie, but it does help it to transcend the sort of self-congratulatory vibe which might ring out beyond the sadness of its inevitably tragic finale. The note of hope one feels at the conclusion of Lincoln feels genuine, and genuinely earned." - Dennis Cozzalio
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