Sometimes it’s hard to believe how far America has come in the past hundred and fifty years or so. Near the end of Lincoln, the Congress goes into riot mode, not when it’s suggest that slaves should be freed, but when it’s suggested that women and former slaves should be given the right to vote. They didn’t like the idea of interracial marriage, either.
The bulk of Lincoln deals with whether or not the President will be able to get enough votes to pass the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution abolishing slavery. There is a lot of wheeling and dealing, a lot of arm twisting, and a shocking amount of drama for an event that we all know the outcome of.
I liked Lincoln, there were a lot of emotional moments and a lot of what-if moments where the War could have been ended earlier and the 13th Amendment might have failed to pass. But the best parts were little slices of life we see of Abraham Lincoln as a sort of regular guy who likes to tell stories and has issues with his family. These were the moments where Daniel Day-Lewis won his Academy Award, bringing a near mythic figure to life and making him real.
Lincoln was a long movie and there were one or two times that it seemed to drag a bit. The endless list of long forgotten Congressmen and the countless backroom meetings in basements and storage rooms and attics got old after a while.
The cast was brilliant, the directing perfect-meaning Spielberg toned it way down from his over the top job on Warhorse-and the costumes and sets were spot on and often amazing. I was particularly impressed with a shinny new Capitol Building and the muddy streets of Washington. Lincoln had a great look and feel. The only thing really missing was the theme song from PBS’s The Civil War, the music from Lincoln left little impression on me.
All in all, Lincoln was a great film.
