The Fateful Lightning of 'Lincoln'

By Dan Hagen

An Illinois boy, I’ve been bored by the deification of Abraham Lincoln, that mushy, rotten-apple worship that has prompted thousands of books about him and seems to have subtly tainted every screen portrayal of the man.

Daniel Day-Lewis as the martyred 16th president

I always smelled a rodent there. Men who become symbols also become the vehicle for somebody else’s agenda.

Besides, if Lincoln was a humble, woodsy rail-splitter grown to godhood, then his emancipation of a people was no trick at all, right? Freeing whole peoples is what gods do. It would seem to be one of their hobbies.

But Daniel Day-Lewis, in Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln, is no god. Noble, long-suffering, yes, but always human, pressed to perform a task that seems just about humanly impossible — the moral elevation of a society determined to resist it.

What Day-Lewis seems to be is not a deity but — and I’m reluctant to gush in this way — President Lincoln.

Sitting between Paul Beals and Matt Mattingly, I felt more than once that I was actually seeing Lincoln, and choked up more than once, too, hearing similar soft gurgles from either side.

In this definitive performance, Day-Lewis’ reedy voice pleads and ponders, cajoles and compels, finally rising, when he is sufficiently provoked, to ringing moral imperative. His eyes twinkle, light with sly insight, deepen to reflect the still waters of compassion, and finally grow opaque to hint at the operation of a genius just beyond our reach. Day-Lewis uses Lincoln’s homespun shaggy-dog humor to woo others, to relieve Lincoln’s own considerable tensions but also, I think, as a trick to blind people to the operation of an intelligence they might otherwise fear.

Day-Lewis sometimes moves — for example, while embracing his boy Tad or clapping a friend on the knee — with a matter-of-fact openness that suggests a man who understands love and thirsts for it. A single deft scene — in which Lincoln compliments his father’s insight while ruefully hinting that they loathed each other — suggests a source for that thirst.

Daniel Day-Lewis, beleaguered but "clothed in immense power."

As abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, Tommy Lee Jones is here to flash his familiar trick — flat, unanswerable, hard-bitten wit — in a role that provides a perfect fit for it. Sally Field makes Mary Todd Lincoln a fully sympathetic character by showing us the urgent, vulnerable empathy that she has brought to the best roles of her career, as well as that spunky determination that makes her character easily a match for anyone who cares to cross her. David Strathairn, James Spader and Joseph Gordon-Levitt round out a top-flight cast at the top of its game.

And what playthings this play has provided for these distinguished professionals. Tony Kushner’s dialogue has the bracing, emphatic clarity of lightning cutting right across an ominous, roiling sky. It is Chayefsky-like, romantic, far-sighted, swiftly intelligent, elevated in tone and concern.

These are articulate Americans — not indifferent to education, as we are now, but determined to use their hard-won eloquence in the service of the greatest moral crisis in the nation’s history. The fact that they know what’s at stake — the end or the perpetuation of nothing less than human enslavement — lends their political struggles a thriller-like desperation, played out against a backdrop of wartime personal problems that might paralyze others. Mere ticking time bombs seem ho-hum by comparison.

No one is going to walk out of that theatre muttering the familiar cynical cheap shot that the Civil War “wasn’t about slavery,” or that slavery’s finish was accidental or inevitable — not after seeing the chess-like ingenuity, deft deceptions, philosophical clarity, emotional exhaustion and sheer courageous cussedness that these characters must deploy to get the job, finally and forever, done.

As the film ended, the packed-house audience, knowing the actors couldn’t hear them, applauded them anyway.
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Nov. 26, 2012, update. I saw "Lincoln" again yesterday afternoon, and it was if anything more powerful the second time around. 
I think this movie will live, and perhaps counterbalance "Gone With the Wind" as the overriding popular culture image of the Civil War. 
Yesterday I could stop talking in my Day-Lewis Lincoln voice. I never saw the like of it. Never saw the like.