The American Civil War (1861 – 1865) has been the subject of
many feature films over the years from Birth
of a Nation (1915) to Cold Mountain
(2003) via epic movies like Gone with the
Wind (1939), Gettysburg (1993), Ride with the Devil (1999) and many
more. This week’s Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre Film Club, again hosted by
Mr Stephan Pickering standing in for his wife Pat who unfortunately was
suffering from a bout of the flu, was screening Lincoln (2012) an
absorbing, performance driven film that invites you to witness the last four
months of Abraham Lincoln’s life right up to his assassination on the 14th
April 1865 by the American stage actor and Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes
Booth at the Ford Theatre Washington DC while watching a play accompanied by
his wife Mary Todd Lincoln. We see very little of the actual war, the movie
focuses on the presidents efforts to have the Thirteenth Amendment to the
United Constitution passed by the United States House of Representatives, and
the underhanded skulduggery that went on from the President down in a attempts
to get this unpopular amendment passed. The text of the 13th amendment read:
Section 1: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except
as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their
jurisdiction.
Section 2: Congress shall have power to enforce this article
by appropriate legislation.
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| The President and his First Lady Spielberg style. |
The movie is directed by Steven Spielberg, his best film
since Munich in 2005 and includes a
cast of over 100 speaking parts. These actors are really on top of their craft,
including Daniel Day Lewis, who won a clutch of Best Actor Awards for his uniquely
masterful portrayal of Lincoln, Sally Field outstanding as the First Lady,
Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Robert Todd Lincoln, David Strathairn, as Secretary of
State Seward, Tommy Lee Jones superb as Thaddeus Stevens and John Hawkes as
Colonel Robert Latham. The key source of
the screenplay is the biography called Team
of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
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| The real thing! |
My only criticism is in its typical American ending, which
yet again tends to add a coating of sickly syrup where its not needed. It
should have finished with the President leaving the White House; we all know
what happens next so there was no need to extend it to include flickering
candles! That apart the movie is a fascinating political drama that I could not
recommend more and I’m sure that supplementary viewing’s would only increase the
enjoyment.
