In another more "meaningful" way, the movie also boils the president down to the most human level yet seen. Gone is the iconography. Gone are the famed tales of doing his math homework in charcoal and writing the Gettysburg Address on a napkin with the blood squeezed from a dragon or whatever. Gone is the history viewed in hindsight.
What we're left with is a strikingly, at times frustratingly, intimate portrayal of a man who has long since belonged to the ages. If its main lesson is the simple one that Lincoln lived his life as a human being - plain spoken, personable, with moments of doubt - maybe that's a lesson worth remembering. History isn't made by faces on the coins we use to scrape gum off our shoes. It's made by actual people who show up.
As I watched "Lincoln," I felt an acute awe that here's a man who actually lived and interacted with other humans. A near-childlike observation, I know. But also a vital one.
Spielberg's boldest gambit, one that ironically proves to be his greatest asset while also holding the movie back from greatness, is his razor focus. Forgoing the usual "greatest hits" biopic style ("Here's the Lincoln/Douglas debates, here's the death of his son, here's the..."), the bulk of "Lincoln" dwells in the last few months of his life as he pushed to pass the 13th Amendment. It's the style favored by Philip Seymour Hoffman's "Capote." Pick one key event from the subject's life and dive headfirst into it, blowing up each detail to life size and hoping it paints a larger, more symbolic picture of the man.
Oddly this also creates a schizophrenic struggle that the movie never quite overcomes. It wants to be a historical epic while remaining a small-scale character study. It wants to be a "how the sausage is made" political drama, but with that usual dash of Spielberg populism. If we get no closer to what made Lincoln tick, maybe that wasn't on Spielberg's agenda. It still leaves an emotional distance between us and a man clearly intended to be a character in his own drama.
Spielberg can't for the life of him shoot a movie that doesn't look at home on the big screen. With cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, he bathes interiors in lush light and shadow and supplies a more cinematic vista than his story seems to even request. Still, "Lincoln" has comfortably rested on Spielberg's to-do list for the better part of a decade and damned if the resulting movie makes evident why.
God, though. To be in the same room as Lincoln. To watch him react. To watch him spout anecdotes and tell jokes. To watch him struggle when men stand in his way. Daniel Day Lewis' greatest gift as an actor is his ability to be perpetually in the present. We never catch him planning his next movie or behaving out of artifice. It's a downright eerie transformation, completely devoid of vanity, and just a towering achievement.
In fact, Spielberg himself displays an admirable lack of vanity, stepping back more than I can remember to let those around him shine. This is a performer's picture, at times becoming a game of Spot That Character Actor (knowing the guy who appeared in both "Breaking Bad" and "The Wire" earns you bonus obsessor points). James Spader in particular delights by popping in and seeming to forget he's in a costume drama.
Everything I can ultimately say about "Lincoln" is that which will drive certain crowds away while sending others a-flocking. Don't expect sweep. Don't expect bombast. Don't even expect goosebumps. Instead, expect a meticulous study in how one particular piece of history is made by the people who showed up to make it. Characters sure do talk for multiple turns of the script's pages - screenwriter Tony Kushner never met a monologue he couldn't expand, and Spielberg never met a monologue he couldn't slowly zoom in on while the John Williams score swells.
Still, as I write this, President Obama recently earned his second term. He stands center in a nation that sees him either as a pillar of nobility and good intentions, or an agent of our demise. No one yet knows how this period of history will play out. And it's vaguely comforting to see on screen one of our greatest presidents when he was alive and knew just as little, but trying his best to figure things out as they came. If "Lincoln" doesn't draw direct parallels between those times and ours, it shouldn't have to. History just repeats itself with different clothes.
It's a dry but absorbing work, seemingly destined to bore unsuspecting middle schoolers to tears when their teacher doesn't have a lesson planned. Whatever. Kids don't deserve Daniel Day Lewis. But this story does deserve a bigger stage.
