I’m not big on American films about American subjects, and I’m not big on American history either, so I had mixed expectations of this film. However, I had received good reports of it and of course it has garnered more than a handful of award nominations, so I gave it a go, and I’m very glad I did.
It is extremely difficult to point to anything at all that Steven Spielberg has got wrong in this remarkable picture. The only thing that I really wish he had reconsidered is what seems an over-use of captions. OK, it is helpful to have an occasional pointer telling us that time has passed and we have been spirited to a new location, but when we are treated to a series of captions telling us who the characters are that are coming into shot and what their roles are I lose the sense of cinematic magic for a moment and I’m back in a history lesson. This aside, Lincoln is a towering piece of cinema that quickly justifies the plaudits being heaped upon it.
The low-key unsaturated colour and lighting render the immaculately designed sets and costumes beautifully and give the film a perfect period feel, whether in its smoke-filled rooms or on the battlefields.
There are far too many excellently drawn supporting roles to mention them all, but special note has to go to Sally Field (never usually a great favourite of mine) for her First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln and Tommy Lee Jones for his genius Thaddeus Stevens, both of which are Oscar nominated.
I can’t claim to have seen all of Daniel Day-Lewis’s film appearances but I’ve seen most, and here he seems to have played what must be the performance of his career in this monumental portrayal of Abraham Lincoln. Much has been said about how true to life his vocal characterisation is and I don’t really know how we can be sure of this (after all, the man died before the advent of sound recording) but it is totally believable. It may have been criticised in many quarters but Day-Lewis did his research and it conforms to the contemporary written accounts, if maybe not to the mental image many Americans prefer to have of how their 16th President sounded.
I expect we owe the physical resemblance partly to the hair and makeup department – surprisingly absent from the Oscar nominations – but mostly to Daniel Day-Lewis himself, whose stoop, gait and facial expressions seem to bring the President eerily to life.
Overall Lincoln is a great piece of ensemble acting and the dialogue is superb, carrying the narrative and the drama whilst managing touches of humour along the way. There has been mixed comment about the use of written records to construct much of the script but for me it was a superbly judged screenplay.
I was struck very early in the film by the stylistic resemblance that John Williams’s score had to the music of Aaron Copland, something that fits the subject matter extremely well. It was during the sequence in which Lincoln is quoting Euclid on Equality that I recognised what appeared to be more or less a direct quote from Copland’s Lincoln Portrait – clearly a deliberate piece of musical referencing and one that seemed remarkably fitting.
Despite my mixed expectations, I was captivated by this picture from the outset and it certainly didn’t feel anything like its 150 minutes.
I watched Lincoln at FACT Liverpool; for more details see my posting of 24th January. http://www.fact.co.uk/
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