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FILM
SPIRIT OF ’65
BY
S C O T T W IL S ON
Spielberg and Day-Lewis make a dream of Lincoln.
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INVITES YOU AND A GUEST TO SEE
I
t’s a fact: A book about Abraham Lincoln is published every 15 minutes. In the nearly 150 years since he was assassinated, so much has been written about the 16th U.S. president that 27 such volumes are just about his hatbands. Yet there’s still appetite enough that Bill O’Reilly can slap his name on a $28 erratarama about the Great Emancipator’s slaying and score a best-seller. Meanwhile, every 45 minutes or so, someone tells a lie about Steven Spielberg. It’s de rigueur now to disparage or dismiss history’s most successful movie director — he’s too sentimental, too manipulative, too predictable. These protests usually take the form of defensive denial: “Hey, man, I don’t even remember the third time I saw Jurassic Park.” But film is a happily manipulative medium as well as a purely voluntary experience. We strap ourselves into the harness of suspended disbelief, and we complain equally when it sags and dips our knees in the dirt (too real!) and when it launches us too high (fake!). Either way, can we really be made to feel anything that isn’t somewhere waiting to be triggered? Maybe we want to — and maybe that’s why people still line up to see Spielberg’s movies. Besides, movies don’t arrive much more blue-chip than his new Lincoln. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis, widely regarded as the best actor working in film. It’s heavily based on historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 juggernaut, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, with a script by the justly lauded playwright Tony Kushner. Throw all their trophies in a buggy, and the horse might have to think it over — and that’s before you toss in Tommy Lee Jones’ and Sally Field’s Oscars and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Teen Choice awards. The weight of all that pedigree sounds oppressive, but Lincoln is not a fussy epic. It’s swift (a modest two and a half hours), vivid and witty. By Spielberg standards, it’s both homespun and talky. (In the early going, its ricocheting dialogue and glimmers of idealism feel like something rifled from Aaron Sorkin’s middle West Wing drawer.) It is also, by some distance, the best-acted of Spielberg’s movies. There’s no verb left for what Day-Lewis does onscreen, and that’s been true for a while. But whatever studied calculations led him to his Lincoln, with this pained carriage and this cracker-barrel voice and these bottomless silences, the result is seamless and organic — not a performance or even another of his extreme inhabitations but a possession. Spielberg’s deepest art here is in the way he understands what his star is doing: playing a ghost. His and Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is our collective dream of someone unknowable, an ethereal character who over and over materializes unexpectedly to tell some small but important story and disappear again into the dark. (Several of these short duets occur when Lincoln wakes someone.)
Day-Lewis looks at history. After a battlefield prologue and a kind of post-prologue that introduces the president in 1865, Lincoln comes to us in a dream — one of his own. Director of photography Janusz Kaminski, after two scenes shot in virtual darkness, bathes Day-Lewis in distorted, bent-sepia light to indicate the migraine vision rushing past. With that, Kaminski and Spielberg (borrowing from their Saving Private Ryan palette of lead and mud) turn up their lamplight just enough to suggest a constant shroud. We won’t really see daylight until the republic is restored, until Lincoln leaves us. While he remains, he must pass the 13th Amendment. Not much of a cliffhanger, but that’s where the rest of the cast comes in. As each player is introduced, Kushner asks us to keep a mental tally of votes for and against the amendment, tracking loyalties as they shift. Cadging those votes for the White House are a trio of historical composites played by James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson and John Hawkes, whose progress we monitor by listening for the corn-pone theme that John Williams has given them, a recurring Hee Haw cue interrupting an otherwise low, stately score. All you really have to do, though, is watch Jones, who plays abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens with a merkin on his head and an authentic political weariness everywhere else. He, David Strathairn and Sally Field (as, who else, the damaged Mary Todd Lincoln) match DayLewis, coaxing notes from him that few others have. Stevens’ turn alone with that apparitional Lincoln is as good as this kind of scene gets. Concentrating on the last four months of Lincoln’s life keeps the drama tight and sharp, but it lets Spielberg achieve something else, too. If last year’s War Horse was his unabashed ode to Technicolor John Ford, then his shadowy Lincoln answers Ford’s deeply moral blackand-white classic Young Mr. Lincoln, from 1939. What David Thomson, writing about Saving Private Ryan, has called “the tremor of decency” runs through both directors’ works. In Day-Lewis, it finds a once-in-a-career anchor.
Text the word ENGAGE and your zip code to 43549 for a chance to attend this not to be missed theatre event that will feature two of the most popular Next Generation episodes from season 2 on Thursday, November 29th at 7:00PM. (Example: engage 64108)
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IN SELECT THEATRES FOR A SPECIAL ONE NIGHT EVENT
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29
kansas city pitch thursday, november 15 2.305x5.291
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