Thinkin’ Lincoln

If you’ve seen the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, you no doubt noticed that the film it was selling looked like an eerily perfect facsimile of exactly what one’s mind immediately conjures at the notion of America’s Most Beloved Filmmaker taking on America’s Most Beloved President. Soaring John Williams music, long wide shots of people staring up at something angelic apparently just above the audience’s head, and Very Serious Actors making Very Serious Declarations. Daniel Day Lewis – of late referred to as cinema’s “Greatest Living Actor” – plays an Abraham Lincoln cast in the hagiographic mold most familiar to casual observers of American History: a demigod of goodness and honesty, aglow with the power that radiated from what we now recognize as his greatest accomplishment in the ending of slavery.

What a surprise, then, to discover that apart from a handful of big moments (which, realistically, the audience would not have forgiven being presented in any other way), Lincoln is very much the opposite of its own marketing. Instead of a sweeping Old Hollywood biopic, it’s a fast moving, tightly-focused piece set almost exclusively around the political machinations of passing the 13th Amendment. Lewis’ Honest Abe plays the role of wizened sage as a public figure but reveals himself as a self-amused, shrewdly confident operator behind the scenes and a complex, haunted human being behind closed doors. And far from the maudlin, starry-eyed sentimentality that drowned out much of Amistad, the political machinations that form the meat of Lincoln play out more often as snappy, Mamet-esque conversational battles and even screwball comedy on occasion.

But what’s really surprising (and, for me, particularly thrilling) is that it ultimately reveals itself as something like a radical political film. Not quite a screed, granted, but wholly unexpected all the same. Lincoln, despite presiding over a brutal Civil War, is typically presented in film as the archetypal Great Man whose sainted goodness is agreed upon by all. Spielberg, while undeniably super-talented as a cinematic artist, built much of his substantial box office clout on his ability to draw large and diverse audiences into a shared emotional embrace.

Spielberg and Lincoln. It’s the unlikeliest possible coupling one could think of when imagining the making of an incendiary political piece, but here we are. In its own way, Lincoln could well be the most radical American political drama to hit theaters in years. Where other movies about the political process decry cynicism and hold up simplistic moralism as the ultimate ideal, Lincoln dives down into the amoral muck of bare knuckle politics. The film posits backroom deals, double crosses, fine print shenanigans, rule bending and outright law flouting as the real tools of transformational social upheaval, and holds up the “dirty-tricksters” and do anything, say anything political operators as the real heroes of American progress – their corruption made moot by the rightness of their cause. In the spirit of 2012’s other movie about the 16th President, a fitting fuller title for Spielberg’s opus could easily have been Abraham Lincoln: Machiavellian Superhero.

Our setting is late 1864. Lincoln has won a decisive re-election to the Presidency, his Republican party has won a majority in Congress and the Civil War has ceased to be a question of who will win and become one of when will the South give up. When the New Year arrives and the newly-elected Republican Congressmen take their seats, Lincoln will have near absolute power to pass his legislative agenda, chiefly the 13th Amendment abolishing all slavery in the United States, but the President doesn’t want to wait that long.

Fearing that the amendment will be perceived as unduly partisan (and thus more vulnerable to future assaults) if enacted in a lopsided vote and that Northern voters will lose their tenuous support for Abolition if the war itself ends prematurely, Lincoln sets his sights on a bold gamble. The Congressional Democrats rendered “lame ducks” (read: politicians in the period between losing an election and officially departing the office) by the wave of Republican victories that accompanied Honest Abe’s election might be led to cast what would previously have been career-ending votes for abolition on their way out, if only they could be persuaded.

So, yes. Lincoln is essentially a movie about subverting the democratic process in the name of positive reform. The good guys are the team of shady arm-twisters and glad-handers whom Lincoln dispatches to purchase enough “yes” votes to pass his radical, unpopular (at the time) reform while he and his allies dig in behind the scenes to run a complex shell game bent on keeping a collapsing Confederate enemy in the dark as to the amendment until it’s too late for them to do anything about it.

There hasn’t been a film that found so much humor and even heroism in acts of subterfuge and misdirection since Ocean’s Eleven, and in a way that’s an appropriate comparison. Lincoln could easily be viewed as a caper movie in which Abe and company more or less steal slavery from the South through a massive, elaborate con. For the American political history genre, which typically casts honest-to-a-fault paragons as the only possible heroes and cynical backroom deal-making as poison in the national bloodstream, this is about as far afield as you get. Even Daniel Day Lewis’ Lincoln is strikingly different from the norm, less a towering soothsayer than a deceptively modest Lawyer In Chief who delights in answering questions with stories and tying his opponents up in verbal knots. The performance, like the film, is as far removed from “Oscar Bait” as it can be while still allowing Lewis the chance to turn “I am the President of The United States … clothed in immense power!” into this year’s thundering macho war cry line.

Nearly every scene involving the machinery of passing the Amendment is framed in terms of lionizing pragmatic political jujitsu over wide-eyed truth telling. The film’s key secondary story involves Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the so-called “Radical Republicans” and for years the Senate’s most vocal advocate not only for the end of slavery but also for views on the equality of races that placed him nearly a century ahead of most other men of his time. He’s the “happy warrior” rascal of the film, the man with the guts to be as radical in public as Lincoln is in private, but even his arc is effectively about the heroism of dishonesty in the service of “getting things done.” To mollify skittish fellow Republicans, Stevens is asked to state that he does not intend abolition as a springboard to full rights and citizenship for slaves (a lie, to say nothing of a denial of his entire career as an activist) on the floor of the Senate. What he does, and his subsequent explanation of why, are scenes that could easily win Jones a second Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

Lincoln‘s content and angle are surprising, but its quality is not – incendiary political zeal and all, it’s exactly the kind of polished, assured filmmaking we’ve come to expect from Spielberg at this stage of his career. It’s likely that audiences, particularly in the U.S., are a little tired of all things political after this year, but this is one you don’t want to miss … even if (maybe especially if) you think it might really tick you off.

Bob Chipman is a film critic and independent filmmaker. If you’ve heard of him before, you have officially been spending way too much time on the internet.