Spielberg’s Lincoln: An Ambitious Pastiche

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is a film geared to the tastes of another time and place. Charged with the herculean task of considering the legacy of “the Great Emancipator,” the film is a marathon of rhetoric-laden vignettes that would surely have satisfied the elocution-hungry crowds that gathered for the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The film is not so much a Lincoln biopic as an ensemble-led lesson in crafting legislation in the nineteenth-century United States. While one would perhaps expect a split focus between the public and private personae of Lincoln (and there is plenty of that), it is clear from the onset that the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is, in fact, the central character of this narrative. One of the film’s virtues is that it shows that while the end of slavery was all but assured, the legal status of formerly enslaved persons was by no means certain when the Civil War ended. If the war measures Lincoln took to emancipate slaves were not confirmed by a constitutional amendment, emancipation (at least in a de jure sense) could be repealed with a single act of peacetime legislation. The future of former slaves, and those who still remained in slavery as in the border states, would have been uncertain.

Talk among my neighbors in the theater highlighted the impression that Abraham Lincoln himself received less screen time than was expected. While Lincoln is clearly a leader in the cabinet room, the actual heavy lifting of guaranteed emancipation is portrayed as occurring in Congress. The variety-show pacing of set-piece speeches and conversations effectively, if sometimes tiresomely, illustrates the political wheeling and dealing that ran a nationwide patronage system based in the District of Columbia. The film nonetheless has a potent emotional impact through effective use of imagery and a few exceptional individual performances.

Lincoln proved to be a well-executed feat of character acting, both in its portrayals of well-known individuals and in its introductory characterizations of historical also-rans. Daniel Day-Lewis complements an excellent physical resemblance to Abraham Lincoln with a mastery of Lincoln’s curious mannerisms and modes of speech to bring the character vividly to life. He makes use of a high reedy voice, a lumbering stoop-shouldered gait, and a seemingly endless store of amusing anecdotes, precisely as the historical Lincoln did. Sally Field’s Mary Todd Lincoln is haggard, domineering, and effective from the first shot. Her vitriolic speech and explosive temper is let loose in tempests of alternating rage and sorrow when alone with the president, and in dagger-sharp barbs and invectives pronounced through a forced smile while in public. David Straitharn’s William H. Seward is disappointingly overshadowed by his dandyish wardrobe, which was, however, a reflection of how Seward actually dressed. Lee Pace presents a laudable Fernando Wood, the macassar-slicked, arms-akimbo representative of the Democratic Party’s opposition to the proposed Thirteenth Amendment. He portrays elegantly a man who, as mayor of New York City, had lobbied for a city-wide secession to maintain trade ties with the Confederacy. Still, highest praise must be reserved for Tommy Lee Jones, who perfectly captures the zeal and foul-tempered public persona of the too-often forgotten Thaddeus Stevens. If nothing else, the film has ensured a revival of interest in Stevens, who may well have been the greatest Pennsylvanian of his or any other generation. (See the article on Stevens by Christopher Shepard in the January 2013 issue of Pennsylvania History.)

The film is broad in its ambitions but falls short in a number of key areas. While battlefield sequences are not necessary to a film centered around events in Washington, DC, the film gives the impression that Lincoln treated the war as a back-burner issue. The historical roles of Seward, an energetic supporter of abolition, and Lincoln, who favored a more...