With a screenplay by Tony Kushner, adapting Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln," the film masterfully captures the dual dilemmas facing the president in the final months of his life: how to bring the war between the states to an end and heal a broken land, and how to eradicate slavery, once and for all.Īnd though his goals were lofty, the country-lawyer-turned-commander in chief was savvy enough to know that deals needed to be made, scores settled, patronage jobs promised, if he was to win over the anti-abolitionist Democrats in the House of Representatives.Īnd so, "Lincoln" is as much about the process of our political system - then, and (yes) now - as it is about the people who preside over it, who manipulate it, try to master it. "Lincoln" begins with bayonets and mud and muskets, soldiers of the Union and the Confederacy in close, miserable combat, but for the most part, the action in Spielberg's handsome piece of history is verbal, emotional, electric. And Lincoln's determined campaign to outlaw the trade in human beings ("If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," he wrote) is being thwarted by a recalcitrant Congress. The Civil War has taken hundreds of thousands of lives. In "Lincoln" - Steven Spielberg's penetrating portrait of a nation's leader at a moment of epic crisis - Daniel Day-Lewis delivers an utterly extraordinary performance, his voice aquiver, his body angular but pliant, moving with a creaking, spongy gait down the corridors of the iconic residence on Pennsylvania Avenue. His house is the White House, and the wraith is Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States. Tall and bent, his shoulders wrapped in a wool throw, he's a chilling figure in a cold, dark house. A bearded wraith, his brow etched with deep grooves, skulks around in the dead of night.
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