Weakest Spielberg ever?

FILM REVIEW

Lincoln
DIRECTED BY: Steven Spielberg
STARRING: Daniel Day Lewis, Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, James Spader
CERT: 12A

In its opening scene, Lincoln promises to be the epic its name suggests. There’s a brutal Civil War battle in a muddy field, where a black regiment of Union soldiers puts down their Confederate enemy in merciless close combat. In its brief, primitive way, it’s almost as effective as Spielberg’s other opening battle scene, from Saving Private Ryan. Just a pity, then, that it’s downhill all the way from there.

 

Lincoln (Day Lewis) himself turns up immediately after, seen initially from behind as he listens to a pair of black troops retell of the battle and complain that they are paid considerably less than their white counterparts.

It’s a badly written and ultimately very silly scene from the heavy hand of screenwriter Tony Kushner, a foretaste of almost everything that follows.
From this point on, Spielberg confines the film almost entirely to the dark, drab city of Washington and any promise of a stirring epic turns out to be miserably empty.

The film is set in the final months of Lincoln’s life. He’s just been re-elected for a second term but the war is in its fourth year and the man is physically depleted from the toll. He’s initiated peace talks with the Southern states, but is having to balance this delicate act with fulfilling his ambition to emancipate slaves. He’s pushing for a constitutional amendment to guarantee their freedom and is having to hustle and wrangle for every single vote. To this end he has employed a trio of enforcers – led by an excellent but almost unrecognisable James Spader – to bring in the numbers by any means possible.

Pork barrel spending, jobs for the boys – clearly the great man was not above stooping low for the result.
This is what plays out for almost the entire two-and-a-half hour running time – men talking politics in one stuffy, poorly-lit room after another, many of them surely important characters played by a massive line-up of major actors, not that you ever get to spend too much time with most of them. Tommy Lee Jones is one of the few exceptions as staunch abolitionist Thadeus Stevens, a man with the power to sway the House of Congress one way or another. He gives a fine, restrained performance.

Sally Field stands out too as Mrs Lincoln, though not always for good reason. The president’s wife was said to be of shaky mental health and Field hits that note occasionally – most notably in an argument with her husband over the enlistment of their son. Mostly though, she gives in to her tendency to overact.

There’s a fair bit of time given to Lincoln’s family life but most of it is dull and unnecessary. Spielberg tries to make something of the conflict between Lincoln and his oldest son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) but there’s so little real emotion involved, it’s just a waste of time.
That’s probably the big problem with the film as a whole – it’s full of importance and intellectual chatter but, shockingly for a Spielberg film, there’s hardly any heart or guts.

What little there is comes almost entirely from Daniel Day Lewis, whose performance is really the only thing worth going to see. He plays Lincoln as a stooped, fragile man, worn down by the job, troubled in his soul, a man of gentleness but fierce drive.
There are any number of scenes where Day Lewis is mesmerising – telling old stories, commanding his cabinet, quietly crafting a letter for a pair of messenger boys – but there is one that stands out above them alll. It’s near the end, when he’s sitting on the porch with Ulysses S Grant (Jared Harris), the president looking every inch an old man, weary to his bones. “Each of us has made it possible,” he says, “for the other to do terrible things.”

It’s stuff worthy of a far better film than the one Spielberg has made. Lincoln has its moments – and it has Daniel Day Lewis – but for so much of its running time, it’s visually grim, dramatically dull and very painfully boring. It also goes on several scenes too long. It could have ended with Lincoln walking down the hall, leaving for his final carriage ride to the theatre but Spielberg drags it out like he can’t bear to let go, doing a Peter Jackson on the poor doomed man.

It’s weak stuff from a man who can still be a great director when he wants to be. But if Spielberg has made a worse movie than this, I haven’t seen it.