Movie Review: Lincoln

Portraying historical figures on film is a daunting challenge.  Such is particularly the case for beloved American icons with well-established identities.

The filmmaker’s challenge rests not so much in recreating history.  Typically, plenty of credible narratives exist which provide multiple accounts of the icon’s role in history.

What’s toughest is striking the right balance between realism and art, melding history with entertainment, and doing what would seem impossible — satisfying academics, film critics, and the fickle ticket-buying, movie-going public.

This is where Lincoln, the new film by director Stephen Spielberg ultimately soars on at least one account, but fails in others.

Based in part on a book by noted presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, the film concentrates on the final five months of Abraham Lincoln’s life.  Surprisingly, this is not a war movie as much as an intriguing political drama.  The film’s primary focus is the struggle to pass the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  That’s the amendment which essentially outlaws slavery in America (Note:  To be precise, the famed Emancipation Proclamation was a war directive.  It took an actual amendment to the Constitution to obfuscate state laws on slavery).

The gauntlet is laid down in the U.S. House of Representatives, where a two-thirds voting majority is needed to change America forever.  Remarkably, the movement to pass the 13th Amendment is exactly 20 votes short.  Virtually all of Lincoln’s advisers, most notably Secretary of State William Seward (played to perfection by the consistently-excellent David Strathairn), pleads with the 16th President to abandon the fight and focus instead on ending the Civil War as quickly as possible.