{"id":4650,"date":"2012-12-13T20:33:54","date_gmt":"2012-12-14T04:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=4650"},"modified":"2012-12-22T13:40:46","modified_gmt":"2012-12-22T21:40:46","slug":"lincoln-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/lincoln-movie-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Lincoln — Movie Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lincoln<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Directed by Steven Spielberg<\/p>\n

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This movie has been hyped and promoted far out of proportion to its merit.\u00a0 Even Lincoln scholars have gotten on the bandwagon heaping praise on this mythologizing propaganda.\u00a0 At first I was puzzled by this.\u00a0 I couldn’t understand why so many scholars would throw their support behind this film in the public way that they have.\u00a0 Are they just afraid to set themselves against something that is so popular and has so much money behind it?\u00a0 But after thinking about it for a few days, I realized that the scholars are actually the problem.\u00a0 Steven Spielberg consulted them and probably followed their advice.\u00a0 He didn’t make this up out of his head, and he didn’t do all the research himself.\u00a0 The community of Lincoln scholars is largely beholden to this idealized, honorific, and in many ways, false conception of Lincoln that the film presents.\u00a0 This film is a correct reflection of the way Lincoln is perceived and reconstructed in mainstream American society, and this in turn derives from the scholarly community that has created and perpetuated this Myth.\u00a0 This Lincoln could have come out of Leave It to Beaver<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 He’s a genial, storytelling, wholesome, fatherly figure.\u00a0 Everyone says Daniel Day-Lewis plays him so well.\u00a0 I don’t get it.\u00a0 He’s nothing like I imagine Lincoln to be.\u00a0 Lincoln was depressive.\u00a0 Melancholy.\u00a0 He was forbidding and aloof.\u00a0 He was indecisive on the one hand, and stubborn on the other.\u00a0 He had human compassion and a crude sense of humor.\u00a0 He was a very astute politician, he had a talent for making deals, and an appetite for power.\u00a0 Psychologically, he was very complex and hard to gauge.\u00a0 He did tell stories, but his stories tended to be earthy, if not vulgar.\u00a0 They served the purpose of entertaining people and making himself the amused center of their attention.\u00a0 At the same time, they served a defensive function in that they enabled Lincoln to conceal himself<\/em>.\u00a0 Lincoln the story teller remained an elusive, private, enigmatic man.\u00a0 The film implies that the story telling was didactic, that he told parables like Jesus to teach people moral lessons.\u00a0 He might have done that.\u00a0 He won some court cases that way, but for the most part Lincoln the story teller was a man hungry for attention and approval.\u00a0 He was a politician looking for support and good will.\u00a0 This movie simplifies him and turns him into a warm, friendly cupcake.\u00a0 It is an apology, an attempt to elevate him, beatify him.\u00a0 It’s a feel good movie, to make Americans feel good about themselves, about America, about the Civil War, and about Lincoln.\u00a0 It starts out with soldiers quoting the Gettysburg Address back to Lincoln, as if the common soldiers were fighting out of a sense of idealism and dedication to the cause of liberty and freedom.\u00a0 Then there is a shot of Lincoln raising an American flag, and a scene with him and his wife, Mary, in private having an intimate conversation like a married couple that is getting along well and has good communication.\u00a0 It’s a lot of nonsense.\u00a0 The biggest lie of all is the portrayal of Lincoln’s marriage and of Mary Lincoln.\u00a0 This is an attempt to rehabilitate Mary Lincoln from the corrupt, mentally ill woman she was, who was the bane of Lincoln’s life, and make her appear to be some strong, influential participant in his decision-making and private deliberation.\u00a0 Sally Field is completely unconvincing as Mary Lincoln.\u00a0 This is a very contrived, incredible role that has nothing to do with the real Mary Lincoln.\u00a0 There was one scene that felt real and that was when Lincoln and Mary had a screaming argument over their son, Robert’s, enlistment in the Union Army.\u00a0 They even have Lincoln slapping Robert in the face at one point — a very unlikely scene that illustrates how far afield they are of Lincoln’s true character. \u00a0In a couple of places the word ‘fuck’ is used as a curse word.\u00a0 This is an anachronism.\u00a0 ‘Fuck’ did not become widespread as a curse word in American English until the late 19th or early 20th century.\u00a0 They can get away with it, of course, because not too many Americans know this and they don’t teach it in school.\u00a0 The rest of the movie was manipulative, annoyingly distorted, and mendacious.\u00a0 The predominant content of the movie is actually the drama surrounding the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, rather than about Lincoln himself.\u00a0 This is also a rather simplified, sanitized, honorific reconstruction.\u00a0 I thought the acting was rather poor in general.\u00a0 Everyone was overplaying and the characters and scenes seemed simplified and cartoonish.\u00a0 This whole movie is just annoying from beginning to end.\u00a0 And it is rather dull, I have to say.\u00a0 I found myself waiting for it to end.\u00a0 I couldn’t get interested in anything they were doing.\u00a0 They have taken an extraordinary time and an incredibly interesting person and turned them into something mundane and ordinary.\u00a0 If you haven’t seen it, don’t go.\u00a0 Watch Ken Burns Civil War<\/em> series instead.<\/p>\n

If you want to learn about Abraham Lincoln for real, take a look at Edgar Lee Masters, Lincoln the Man<\/em>.\u00a0 It was originally published in 1931 and the U.S. Congress actually tried to ban it.\u00a0 That speaks well for it right there.\u00a0 Of the many biographies of Lincoln, which tend to be redundant and hagiographic, Masters is my favorite, because it falls well outside this mainstream tradition. \u00a0Most biographies of Lincoln deal overwhelmingly with the last five to ten years of his life, and they focus on his policies and actions as President rather than his personality or his character.\u00a0 Masters has his flaws, like they all do, but it strikes me as more realistic and it takes more interest in Lincoln as a person<\/em>.\u00a0 C. A. Tripp’s The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln<\/em> (2006) details Lincoln’s affinity for same-sex relationships.\u00a0 My paper, “Was Abraham Lincoln Gay?” (2010) Journal of Homosexuality<\/em> 57:1124-1157, draws heavily on Tripp, and examines Lincoln’s private life and the 19th century sexual culture in which he grew up and lived.\u00a0 Lincoln and Booth:\u00a0 More Light on the Conspiracy<\/em> (2003) by Donald Winkler, is a fascinating study of the assassination of Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth’s relationship to the Confederacy’s intelligence network.\u00a0 David Donald’s Lincoln<\/em> is informative and probably accurate in its facts, although it tends to fall into this apologetic, mythologizing tradition, and is heavily weighted toward the last four or five years of Lincoln’s life as President.\u00a0 One of the best books you can read on this subject is Lincoln in American Memory<\/em> (1995) by Merrill D. Peterson.\u00a0 This is an excellent study of the growth and evolution of the Lincoln Myth in American culture, which this present film perpetuates and promotes. \u00a0Peterson explains how Lincoln was transformed from this ineffective, indecisive, much hated, vilified president that he was into this godlike icon of American goodness.\u00a0 It is important to understand this because it enables one to see why it is well-nigh impossible today to get a balanced, “realistic” understanding of Abraham Lincoln.\u00a0 One’s position on Lincoln will be heavily influenced by one’s take on American history since Lincoln, and where one stands socially and politically in contemporary society.\u00a0 There is no such thing as “objectivity” when it comes to Lincoln.\u00a0 He has become almost a religious myth.\u00a0 It is an annoying myth to me.\u00a0 It is a false myth that embodies a saccharine view of American society and its history, that is conservative, self-congratulatory, glosses over unsavory developments, and is sometimes invoked to justify highly offensive policies, like the expansion of executive power and the abrogation of basic constitutional liberties.\u00a0 This film falls squarely in that mythological tradition, and I think was subtly crafted to resonate with some of the recent overreaches of executive power in the conduct of warfare and the bypassing of due process.\u00a0 I’m not going to make the case in detail, because I would have to watch the film several more times, and I am loathe to put myself through that.\u00a0 But I remember having that feeling several times as I watched it that I was being bamboozled and that it was really referring to our time, rather than being an honest historical piece.<\/p>\n

Steven Spielberg has made a film that he knew would make people feel good and that they would be willing to pay money to see, not something that would disturb them and make them question everything they had been taught about Abraham Lincoln and American history.\u00a0 He has succeeded very well and will undoubtedly be well rewarded for it.\u00a0 But count me as a NO!\u00a0 I am not taken in by it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lincoln Directed by Steven Spielberg     This movie has been hyped and promoted far out of proportion to its merit.\u00a0 Even Lincoln scholars have gotten on the bandwagon heaping…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[837],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4650","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-joe-cillo"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"