Spielberg's Lincoln

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln was my movie selection last night. The screenplay is written by Tony Kushner based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's 2005 book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Kushner tells the story of the passage, by a lame duck Congress in January of 1865, of a Constitutional Amendment abolishing slavery. And he does it impeccably. Don't believe any of the blather you might hear about the film being too long; it is not. It clocks in at approximately the same time as Zero Dark Thirty, two-and-a-half hours, and it moves along just as briskly (if not more so).

The opening scene has Lincoln, played by the Oscar-winning Daniel Day-Lewis, meeting troops, both black and white, getting ready to march to battle. It's an incredible scene, understated but tense; I even started to tear up. So right away I knew Spielberg, Kushner and Lewis were going to deliver the goods. And they do -- throughout the entire film.

That Argo won Best Picture and not Lincoln speaks poorly of the voting membership of the Academy. On the one hand you have a historical sideshow from the dawn of the age of neoliberalism and neoconservatism theatrically inflated to make us feel warm and fuzzy about the CIA and imperial America; on the other, you have a taut politico-historical drama that shines a light on an amazing moment, a moment that has run through our politics forever after -- the outlawing of slavery. (It's hard not to think of today's GOP House majority when watching Lincoln; then it was the Copperhead Democrats, led by Congressmen Fernando Wood and George H. Pendleton, standing in the path of change. The problem today is that we have no Lincoln in the White House or Thaddeus Stevens in Congress.)

Even if you're not a student of American political historical, Lincoln deserves a screening for the performance by Daniel Day-Lewis and the writing of Tony Kushner.