Review of Spielberg's "Lincoln"

 

 

The ghost of Lincoln continues to haunt us. He looms large over our imagination, a figure who has been mythologized to the point that we despair about ever really understanding the man. To a great degree, this is due to the fact that mythology has a momentum that is hard to stop. We elaborate these stories about singular people who have accomplished great things, and we associate them with telling gestures, phrases and characteristics that help to support these myths that we create.

As a young man, I remember hearing about our 16^th president and his achievements during the period of the Civil War. We were told that he had helped to preserve the union by fighting against the secessionists, and that furthermore, he was a paragon of uncompromising rectitude. The Civil War was a tumultuous period in our history, of course, but what does this mean to an eight year old who is dealing with his own crisis of self-identity, living as it were between two worlds and anguishing about whether or not he will ever truly be considered an "American"? The telling gesture and appearance proved more memorable than the consideration of the factors that led to this conflict, and the sight of a tall and lanky man with a somber visage, grave and penetrating, cloaked in black, was one that was quickly burned into our imagination. He was so somber of visage, with sunken cheeks and stony visage, that it is easy to imagine him provoking fear rather and trust, if not for the fact that we also, for some reason, associated him with gentleness and moral rectitude, "Honest Abe" as he was known in popular parlance.
 

But the Civil War was about more than just preserving the many resources and markets found in this territory (as stated in Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States", p. 193), or state’s rights (as the unrepentant Confederate apologists would still seem to insist), or about freeing the slaves. It was a moral question, undoubtedly, and a political one, and also an economic one, but more to it than that. The intervening 150 years have produced an extensive bibliography by scholars who continue to investigate this period, and the figures who played such a prominent role. It seems to me that the ghost of Lincoln cannot be laid to rest because there are still too many unresolved conflicts, one that revolves around the national imaginary, that conjunction of disparate elements that will cohere to form a nation. The story of Lincoln, and by extension, of the Civil War, is a story that is all-too-modern, and it comes down to the way in which we imagine ourselves as citizens and participants in this grand experiment that is the United States of America.

It is with these considerations that I wanted to begin my review of Spielberg’s movie “Lincoln”, one that was released to much critical acclaim in November of 2012. It is a historical film that may be termed a “biopic”, and as such, given the liberties and the broad brush typically used by Hollywood in such films, it was one that faced the very real possibility of perpetuating what are more comforting and simplifying myths about this historical figure, sacrificing subtlety and psychological insight. Many times, what we tend to find in movie treatments, is the temptation to settle for shining surfaces, and not for the imperfections and contradictions that lie underneath. Hollywood has not had an outstanding track record when it comes to these types of films, because the dictates of a commercial film are such that they have little room for exposition, and reserve much more for traditional narrative formulas that are dramatic in nature, because so often they are predicated on direct confrontations, and on what we may term the culminating point.

Refreshingly enough, we don’t have those worries in this film. Spielberg may be a very commercial director, and he is a master of the narrative formulas described above, but he also happens to be a very adept creator who knows when and where to reign in the impulse to embellish and exaggerate in order to highlight important cultural or historical processes. This is not a bloated special-effects laden film, although there is much room and temptation to rely on spectacle, especially for a director with a track record such as that of Spielberg. We have almost no battle scenes, except for what I remember is a short scene illustrating the bombardment of a military base. To the credit of the director, he has chosen to rely on the work of a highly talented screenwriter, Tony Kushner, who wrote the screenplay, and to focus on the drama behind the passage of the 13^th Amendment ("Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction"). It is hard to envision that these elements would have proved as compelling as they do in this film, one that takes place in dim or dark interiors, denoting as this does a type of internal anguish that torments the characters.

We are, of course, taken by the portrayal of a morally ambiguous president, played by accomplished English actor Daniel Day Lewis. How can we give life to a legend, clothe the specter in flesh and allow us to imagine him not as a grand mythological figure, but as a man who had many doubts and qualms, and who had to struggle with these and other personal difficulties? To the credit of the screenwriter and the director, we have the portrayal of a man and not a myth, even if, at the beginning of this film, when Lincoln has just won reelection and is on the verge of winning the Civil War, it is acknowledged by the characters that the man has already become a myth. (We see him in an opening sequence, sitting at night on what appears to be the back of a wagon, lit by candles and a few torches, greeting soldiers, black and white, groups who may not trust each other, or nonetheless unified by the president, who appears almost as a patriarch, in a pose that is a much more informal rendering of that evident in the national monument in Washington.)

 

What makes this film compelling is that, ultimately, it is about a man who is flawed, who is never as consistent as he is portrayed, despite the folk appellation that is assigned to him and that is familiar to any child, that alluded to above, of “Honest Abe”. He is a man of integrity, of course, but he is portrayed as a calculating figure as well, one who was intimately aware of the accommodations and promises and the “dirty business” necessary to garner votes. (The movie doesn't mince in this portrayal of the necessary "horse trading".) He is eloquent, of course, and very charismatic, but we also see a man who is at times overwhelmed, who retreats into himself, pushing away his wife in the course of this hopeless venture, and beseeching her to help him make the load that he carries a little less intolerable. It seems as if we have a man who is complaining and who is less gracious than portrayed, but this representation, rather than diminish him, instead increases his stature, because it makes him much more recognizable, much less distant because he is so like us.

The passage of the 13th amendment was a saga in and of itself. It was predicated on the notion, as explained in the film in terms of the legalistic conception of a trained lawyer such as Lincoln, that no loose ends should be left behind. The Emancipation Proclamation had proclaimed that African-Americans (“negroes”, in the parlance of that time) were now free, and while it was motivated by a military necessity, that of undermining the economic basis of the South so that it wouldn’t be able to continue to muster resistance to the North, it was also motivated by the platform of a party that was created, in large measure, to fight for the abolition of slavery. Whether Lincoln did believe in the eventual incorporation of Negroes as citizens, is a question that hasn’t been fully resolved in my mind. He was a stout Republican, however, and as such, one would have to imagine that he believed in the platform of his party, and the film certainly attributes to him much sympathy towards this group, even if prejudice and discrimination was deeply incorporated into the fabric of national thought throughout the United States.

In a film which can be characterized more as a character study, there is much less scope for grand dramatic action. The conflicts that do occur are evident in the arguments that take place within the White House, either between Lincoln and his cabinet ministers, or between him and the party leaders, or in the debates that take place in Congress. The film relies on witty disputation and on occasional telling and comic stories and put-downs, but as mentioned before, we do not have grand battle scenes or duels or flashy gestures. And thank God, little of the endless explosions that are such a mainstay of Hollywood blockbusters. We have morbid scenes that detail the tragedy of this conflict, with dead bodied laid on the battleground, with looks of utter destitution, while a somber president rides among them, lost in quiet thought, reflecting on the sacrifice that has been paid. (Yes, perhaps the director does pull at a few heartstrings in these scenes, but thankfully, the John Williams score is understated, and doesn't seem too manipulative.)

One of the most refreshing touches in this film is to give us a figure who loved anecdotes, and who no doubt loved not only to embellish them as he told them, but to share them as necessary, during circumstances in which he needed to build rapport with his collaborators, break the tension or convince and shame his antagonists. One of the best of these is the story attributed to Ethan Allan, the American patriot who, while on a visit to the British Isles, found that the still bitter and dismissive British lords had put a portrait of George Washington in the privy as a form of insult. The rejoinder, in which the American patriot turns the insult on its head, is earthy but also has the effect once again of humanizing the myth, showing us a man who was able to cultivate a sense of camaraderie and who knew the value of stories: “It is a valid place for the portrait, and efficacious, for everyone knows that a portrait of George Washington is just what is needed to make the British shit all the faster”, to paraphrase.

 

 

We have three houses that are at war, which represents level upon level of internecine conflict. Besides the conflict between the Unionists and the Confederates, and between the Republicans and the Democrats, we have as well the conflict within the Lincoln household. The president is always being accused by his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, of not doing what is politically expedient, and of sacrificing the interests of the family. She would seem to have a point, for Lincoln seems to spend much more time with his cabinet than he does with her, and one wonders at how strained this marriage must have been. We also have two sons who demand attention, and who Lincoln is tasked with nurturing with what seems to be little help from his wife. The elder son is ashamed of not serving in the army, and he asserts his own need to claim his own space, his own “secession”, in the same way that Lincoln’s wife asserts the priority of her own household and her own kin over the demands of the nation, claiming her own “space” as well. There is a continual search for dignity by those who feel constrained, and these conflicts can’t help but touch upon the grander political and military struggle, and the difficulty that we all have to compromise and cede a little territory, in the same instance in which we have a president who is in charge of reincorporating a group of states, willed as he is to reflect and defend on both personal and public domains. 

And it is in light of this that we can point, once again, to the enduring value of this man and this historical epoch. As I was watching it, I couldn’t help but reflect on the struggles during the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s, and the way in which the task of emancipation was left uncompleted. We know that Lincoln believed in “liberality” when it came to Reconstruction and to reincorporating the leaders of the rebellion, and didn’t wish to create a climate of persecution that would lead to simmering discontent and reprisals, even if the mood in the North seemed favorable to a more vindictive approach. But we also are aware of the fact that Reconstruction was a deeply flawed process that needed a stronger guiding figure, and a stronger institutional (political, economic, social) basis, and because it lacked these elements, it resulted in a process that was left incomplete, with a century of Jim Crow laws to follow in the South and with a legacy of second-class status for many minority communities.

In that sense, I am left to consider how the Civil Rights struggle has also failed to achieve many of the aims that it sought to achieve, and how it remains current in our national imagination. This is all the more so since so many indicators would tend to show that the African American and Latino populations lag behind in many social indicators, and yet, we face a political climate of recrimination that leads us to believe that this legislation was somehow mismanaged. We have, thus, reflection upon reflection, and the wound has still not been healed, with the result that divisions persist, and the legislation that resulted from President Johnson's tenure as president is also under renewed attack (a new bombardment of Ft. Sumter?). This become all the more evident in the recent affirmation of the Supreme Court during the first week of July of 2013 that provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 can be stricken down (specifically, those that have to do with federal supervision of voting rights implementation) because they don’t take into account the new political reality in these southern states that were subject to federal scrutiny. It must have been just as grueling a political fight when Johnson sought to garner support for this legislation during the 60s, and as I watched Spielberg’s film, it seemed to me that I was seeing an episode of recent history.

That is why the ghost of Lincoln cannot be laid to rest yet. There is still a vital debate, and still too many unresolved questions. The fact that Lincoln had to coerce and bribe politicians in order to garner the necessary votes for the amendment, does not subtract from the legend, but instead, shows us a figure who had to rely on much more than just mere charisma, intelligence or soaring eloquence. He knew how to deal with a contentious congress, and he was a man who was able to appreciate and follow the political math, while remaining true to certain principles that, in one telling scene in the film, are summarized in terms of Euclid’s axioms, and one in particular: “Two things that are equivalent to the same thing are equivalent to each other”, to paraphrase.

When it comes to our current president, who was invested in so much hope in a time of such dismal political partisan and a divide that seems to be every bit as wide now as it was 150 (or 50) years ago, I just wish that he had the courage to rely less on his own soaring eloquence and professorial manner and instead show a willingness to visit the trenches, and fight for those things that distinguish us, so that we can finally complete the process of emancipation and determine what it means to form part of a commonweal of citizens.

 

 

OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013)