Lincoln

This week we are screening a real historical epic: Lincoln.

Here are my notes:

Lincoln

USA 2012                    150 minutes

Director:                      Steven Spielberg

Starring:                        Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, Joseph Gordon-Levett and James Spader

Awards and Nominations

• Won two Oscars (including Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis) plus 10 nominations (including Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress (Sally Field), Best Supporting Actor (Tommy Lee Jones) and Best Music (John Williams)
• Won one BAFTA (Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis) plus nine nominations (including Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay)
• A further 57 wins and 95 nominations

 “Steven Spielberg has made more obviously entertaining and more emotionally seductive movies than Lincoln, but this is for him the most brave and, for the audience, most demanding picture in the 40 years since his emergence as a major director.  It's a film about statesmanship, politics, the creation of the world's greatest democracy, and it's concerned with what we can learn from the study and contemplation of history.  Spielberg and his eloquent screenwriter, the playwright Tony Kushner, handle these themes with flair, imagination and vitality, and Daniel Day-Lewis embodies them with an indelible intelligence as the 16th president of the United States.”

Philip French

 In January 1865 Abraham Lincoln is fighting to get the Thirteenth Amendment, which will abolish slavery once and for all, through Congress.  It is the final months of the Civil War and the passage of the Amendment will free all slaves, not just those freed under his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

The film is based on Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Spielberg had been considering a film about Lincoln since 1999 when Goodwin first told him what she was about to write.  Spielberg commissioned an initial script from John Logan with Liam Neeson (who had worked with Spielberg on Schindler’s List) to be cast in the title role.  However the project was delayed and when work began again in 2010 it was announced that Daniel Day Lewis had replaced Neeson and that Tony Kushner had taken over as screenwriter.

Tony Kushner considered Lincoln "the greatest democratic leader in the world" and found the writing assignment daunting because "I have no idea [what made him great]; I don't understand what he did any more than I understand how William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet or Mozart wrote Così fan tutte”.  Kushner struggled with his material and after producing an initial 500 page draft which covered four months of Lincoln’s life he finally decided to concentrate on just the two months during which Lincoln was focussed on the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

In a typically perceptive essay on History and Cinema Simon Schama speculates about films with historical subjects:

“If movie history is to get produced as box office with a conscience, it must serve one of two purposes: explain the Origins of Us or act as Augury of What Is to Come.  But this kind of history, whether designed as the genealogy of identity politics or a prudential political-investment service, seldom escapes the contemporary world that it claims to transcend.”

The chronology of the release of Lincoln clarifies its purpose.  It received its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on 8^th October 2012: a story of a lawyer who had adopted Illinois as his home state and who was elected president despite his lack of experience at a national level.  On 6^th November 2012 Americans re-elected Barack Obama as President:  another lawyer who had chosen Illinois as his home state, who had been criticised when he first campaigned for his lack of experience at a national level, and who had consciously launched his first presidential campaign at the Old Illinois State Capitol in Springfield where Lincoln had made one of his famous speeches.  

Here is the trailer: