What need of one more corpse?

Lincoln

Crit

A good Hoosier friend of mine and I like to spar over our respective claims to this Kentucky native ("Just look at the license plates," I say), and here is a Lincoln well worth a civil war. This is a great, grand film, and the Anglo-Irishman who plays the Ohio Valley's all-time favorite son sets a standard for the role that no actor in his right mind will ever attempt to challenge. The Lincoln that Spielberg gives us (abetted by Tony Kushner, whose script is based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin's magnificent Team of Rivals) is a consummate politician, in a context in which that is not a slur. And the western yarn-spinning that typically has been treated as something a little fey is here shown to be integral in articulating and understanding his political powers. His genius, or part of it, at least, was in being so thoroughly human that no human heart, no matter how innocent or cynical, was beyond his ken. Far from cornpone relics of backwoods lack of sophistication, his tales of the logical behavior of simple folk get to the nub of precisely the sophistication that allowed him to cobble together the unlikeliest but absolutely vital coalition to get the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery forever, through a fractious House of Representatives.

Something else we see here as never before, at least in my experience, is a nobility attached to Mary Todd (Sally Field, in a performance that might just make us like her, really like her, again); we are reminded that being married to a genius, or a saint, is a decidedly mixed blessing, and we tunnel well beneath the rote cantankerous madness that has long been her caricaturization.

When I read Goodwin's book, I so fell in love with the man I'd always loved that I didn't want mid-April 1865 to come; I'd have been happy to have her end the book at Appomattox. In the film, we see him hurriedly getting ready for an evening out when he'd rather stay in, and we're hoping he's not en route to Ford's Theatre. (We've had a foreshadowing of that fatal trip already, with Mary in dangerous dudgeon over eldest son Robert's enlistment.) So when we see "Oriental" garb onstage, and realize that such costumes have no place in Our American Cousin, we are relieved, if only momentarily. But the last of Spielberg's many wise choices is to spare us "sic semper tyrranis" and take us quickly past "Now he belongs to the ages" in order to close with words spoken the month before, the last of Lincoln's best speech, maybe the best speech ever by an American statesman, at his second inaugural:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Is it asking too much for our leaders a century and a half later to at least consider that spirit of reconciliation?

Trailer

• The Lone Ranger--Depp as Tonto? Armie Hammer as the Masked Man? Hell, yeah, kemo sabe!