It's a wide canvas on which to paint and to try to tell a story of Lincoln's life or even just the years of the conflict between the states would be too broad for a single feature film. Even the film's relatively focused source material, Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals casts too wide a net. So the film smartly avoids the tired trappings of the standard biopic by focusing it on Lincoln's single-minded attempt to pass the 13th Amendment. Even much of the war itself is seen peripherally. The movie opens in the middle of the bloody conflict, not entirely unlike the director's previous Saving Private Ryan. But where that movie's long opening sequence focused on the horrors of battle (some might say fetishistically), this one only very briefly shows battle before moving onto a conversation between the President and two black soldiers complaining to him about the inequality between them and their white counterparts. The movie does, in later scenes, show the gruesome result of the conflict--in blood, in limbs. But even that is mainly in service of the secondary story regarding Lincoln and his college-age son, Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who intends to enlist against the wishes of the President and Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Field).
What Lincoln then amounts to is a bit of a political procedural. It's made up of the hand wringing and handshaking of the President's allies and opponents. What it shows most perhaps is the amount of compromise that exists in Washington. Many Republicans, including Lincoln's own right-hand man, Secretary of State William Steward were against pushing so hard for the amendment. And in a way, the movie mirrors this compromise by itself being a collection of these competing interests. Lincoln may the eponymous subject of the movie, but the film spends as much time on the ancillary characters, the men who did much of the grunt work securing the votes they needed on the other side of the aisle to pass the amendment.
Chief among them was Pennsylvania Representative Thaddeus Stevens, played with such a fiery and acerbic wit by Tommy Lee Jones that he could constitute an entire Union front against both the House Democrats and the Rebel Army. The gravel-voiced Stevens is a perfect counterbalance to the elegance of Day-Lewis's Lincoln, and his presence in the House is as much a reason for the passing of the amendment (spoiler?) as the President's own agitation. Though his own compromise during an interrogation on the House floor is perhaps more internal, personal, and of conscience, it is no less integral to achieving the same goal as Lincoln's.For a performance that relies on capturing a particularly noteworthy historical figure and all the "accessories" with which to achieve that performance, it's actually a much less showy performance from Day-Lewis than some of his more recent roles (as in Gangs of New York and There Will Be Blood). His is a quiet, eloquent Lincoln: a man whose oratory skill was in drawing you in rather than rousing you up. A speech he gives early in the film is direct and matter-of-fact. He ends it almost sloppily: "That's it," he says. In that way, he easily fits a certain type of Spielberg hero. Like Captain Miller or Oskar Schindler, Lincoln makes no self-aggrandizing statements about the duty he sees before him. The power lies in his resolve, not histrionics.
It all results in probably the least romanticized version of this movie the parties involved could ever make. The narrative swells, that over-grasping for a sentimental moment for which Spielberg is sometimes criticized is rarely on view here because it is inherent in the subject already. And when the director does briefly, but assuredly, tilts his eye towards mythologizing (there's a very The Searchers-like moment toward the end), it feels earned and properly placed. Lincoln, the President, is a great man and Spielberg knows he doesn't have to hit us over the head with it; and that makes Lincoln, the movie, a great film.
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