Lincoln

Stephen Spielberg’s bounce back from the now more-or-less universally decried Indiana Jones revival, helped along by JJ Abrams’ tribute to his style in Super 8, needed a heavy-hitter in the vein of his Schindler’s List or Amistad to really herald his return to full force. And with Lincoln, he has it – a mature, unpatronising, almost cheese-free historical biopic with some incredible performances that are sure to win a variety of awards and doesn’t have the somewhat hollow sentimentality of War Horse. Here, the mawkish scenes are kept more or less entirely to the bookends of the film – a rather silly opening scene in which Lincoln sits in a chair like his famous memorial and has two black soldiers and two white soldiers come and offer different points of view to him, as well as reciting his speeches back at him, and an ending that while not nearly so hard to believe has a rather awful crossfade from a flame in a lamp to an historic speech.

But the two and a half hours between those points are quite special. Slow at times, heavy undoubtedly – but still engaging, consummately-performed and easily able to keep the viewer immersed in a time of great suffering but great retrospective glamour. The sets are perfect, the casting superb, the wigs and makeup so well-done you notice them only when you are supposed to and the dialogue just the right mixture of formality and believable irreverence.

Central to it all, of course, is Daniel Day-Lewis, who is everything a top Hollywood actor ought to be – acting only in a select few films, avoiding celebrity gutter press and each and every time he appears in front of a camera stunning his audience with a superlative dedication to his craft and outstanding natural abilities. Deservedly, he may well become the first person ever to win the Best Leading Actor Oscar three times in a matter of weeks. That he is the son of one of the people I am writing about in my thesis always gives me a small surreal thrill, but in all honesty that is forgotten within moments of seeing him appear, because he so completely disappears into his character. He may seem an unlikely choice for Lincoln, not even American, but the facial resemblance is certainly there, and it’s quite brilliant how he pitches the performance so that it’s not too dissimilar from that iconic deep, commanding drawl from a thousand documentaries, cartoons and halls of presidents, but softened, taken up an octave or two, and given several notches of kindly old man.

The rest of the cast are also incredible. From characters who have nothing to say but ‘Aye’ or ‘Nay’ but put in a lifetime’s convictions into the word to Lincoln’s misunderstood and long-suffering wife, and especially Tommy Lee Jones as the best kind of loveable curmudgeon with such acerbic vitriol in his speeches that he can make an admission that he is going back on a lifetime’s convictions before his parliament sound like a victory just by turning it into an insult, he is a firey and irascible foil to Lincoln’s fatherly calm.

Not everyone will have a great love for this film. Those with extreme political opinions will find much to fault – on one side, there will no doubt be cries that the film does nothing to represent the South’s point of view and paints them as cardboard villains, and makes Lincoln out as too much of a saint, all the while massaging white liberal guilt. On the opposite side, no doubt there will be cries that this is nowhere near enough, that making a film patting whites on the back for having finally made progress and stopped enslaving other races is just patronising, especially making money from it, and that if the message were sincere, filmmakers and audiences alike would be doing more in the name of restitution. But both are based on political agendas, and it’s better to enjoy this as a slice of a time and a political manoeuvre than anything else.