The wife and I just got back and I absoutely loved it. Everything about it, I thought, was great.
My favorite part, and how I knew that it would be a good movie, was during the opening scene you see a small snippet of a battle. The battle was bloody, brutal, animalistic. War is hell; none of this phony “romanticism” that many American directors love to portray the Civil War as. Way more “Cold Mountain” than “Gettysburg” and I do hope that more directors take note.
Oh, and I laughed (inwardly) at all the people who were on the wrong side of history.
I saw it tonight. I’m a sucker for Lincoln, so I loved it. The Gettysburg Address always makes me tear up, so I am the target of this movie.
It’s been a few hours, so I can probably think clearly about it. I am taking the position that it was a very good movie that had the benefit of having a great subject. DDL’s performance is great, and the part was up to his performance. The supporting cast did very well, with some shining moments out of them, especially Tommy Lee Jones. Shame on the Atlantic for saying his part was two dimensional. Did they even see the same movie? The scene with his fellow PA congressman showed just how shrewd of a politician he was.
Sally Field’s part as Mary Tood Lincoln made me have some sympathy for her for the first time. It’s the first time that I realized the level of stress she had by being married to Lincoln and the emotional toll that must have taken. Even then, she’s not given an overly sympathetic, or even likeable role.
Sadly, I think that the one part that keeps this from being a great movie about a great subject is Speilberg not being able to stop making movies with a feel of an action movie. The comedic relief provided by the lobbyists works. It makes for a much more enjoyable movie than a straight historical piece, and it probably would not be a touch used by a director without his background. The denoument after the 13th amendment is passed and the Confederate delegation is sent away seemed to be sort of tidy and cartoonish in comparison to the rest of the movie. I am not sure that I could have written a better ending out of the historical events, though.
tl:dr: It’d get my vote for best Actor and Actress, and supporting of both. It wouldn’t get my vote for Director or Screenplay. One thumb up my nose.
Are these remarks online somewhere? I’m curious about the details. For example what was his posittion on the EP and how did the film wrongly portray it?
Saw it last night with the spouse, who was the one who wanted to (he goes with me to a lot of movies he’s meh about, so I do the same).
Good points: I thought Daniel Day-Lewis did a fantastic job playing Lincoln. I agree that he “disappeared into the character.” The whole thing did feel a lot like watching history, and not sanitized history. Two of the most effective scenes for me were the one where his son went out back and watched the guys dump the limbs into the mass grave, and the one where Lincoln toured the battlefield at the end–those really looked like dead bodies, not the bloodless ones you often see in this kind of movie. I really got a sense that Lincoln had the weight of history on his shoulders. And Tommy Lee Jones was great, as were the shady guys who were charged with bringing in the reluctant votes. And I liked Lincoln’s joke about George Washington’s portrait.
That said, the movie draaaagggged in the first half. I nodded off a couple of times during the endless “sitting around in rooms discussing political wrangling” scenes. It got better in the second half, but I thought overall it was about half an hour too long, and could have done with a little more action and a little less talk. I know it wasn’t an action movie and I didn’t expect it to be, but by contrast, “Schindler’s List” had me on the edge of my seat through the whole thing, despite being longer and even more serious.
I expect it will rack up a whole herd of Oscars, and deserve most of them. I won’t be going to see it again, though.
Except for his eyes. When I looked in his eyes, I saw DDL. Or, even worse, Ben Stiller.
But I loved the movie.
Here’s a left-field question - does anybody know if somebody was cast to be John Wilkes Booth standing in the crowd at the 2nd inaugural? He was there in reality, but I couldn’t remember where in the crowd to look. Everything else about the inaugural looked as accurate as I could remember the photograph.
I looked very carefully to try to spot Booth, and did not. IMDb.com’s extended cast list for Lincoln doesn’t include anyone playing Booth, nor is he noted as having appeared in Lincoln when you see IMDb’s list of all cinematic appearances of Booth.
Well, thanks for being a better Lincoln fan-geek than me. I looked too, but couldn’t remember where to look. I checked IMDB also for a credit. Even though I didn’t see one, I wondered if they made up an extra and put him in the right place, without giving him credit for a speaking part.
Saw it on Saturday night, and I agree with all the positive comments above especially DDL’s performance.
My only complaint is that every time Tommy Lee Jones or Sally Field or James Spader appeared on the screen, I saw the actor instead of the character. That’s not really a knock on them, it just that they are such familiar faces and they weren’t as unrecognizable as Lewis. I think I would have been more immersed in the movie if they had been lesser-known actors. Also, Jones’ wig looked ridiculous.
On the other hand, I didn’t have that problem with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Maybe it was the mustache.
I literally wept in admiration and gratitude by the end, not only for Lincoln the man but for Day-Lewis’ and Fields’ performances and Spielberg’s direction. It was the first time I’d ever really been able to see Lincoln as a human trying to do what he thought he had to do, and being willing to commit smaller infractions for the greater good, not the plaster saint of traditional American propaganda. Every Lincoln film before has been largely bullshit, but this is finally the real stuff.
There might have been a little too much trotting out of major figures for cameos to check off the list, but what the hell. Bringing Thaddeus Stevens back to life was long overdue, too.
Were there any detectable political statements thrown in by Spielberg.
I’m sure there wasn’t anything ham-fisted like an Oliver Stone movie. Just curious.
I think there were some subtle political statements, I thought the first scene with Lincoln and the black soldiers wasn’t necessary. Especially with the young guy complaining about not equal pay. Yes it’s an historical fact it happened…but at the time it wasn’t on the fore front of the problem of the day.
