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A President Engaged in a Great Civil War

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By A.O. Scott

• Nov. 8, 2012

It is something of a paradox that American movies — a great democratic art form, if ever there was one — have not done a very good job of representing American democracy. Make-believe movie presidents are usually square-jawed action heroes, stoical Solons or ineffectual eggheads, blander and more generically appealing than their complicated real-life counterparts, who tend to be treated deferentially or ignored entirely unless they are named Richard Nixon .

The legislative process — the linchpin of our system of checks and balances — is often treated with lofty contempt masquerading as populist indignation, an attitude typified by the aw-shucks antipolitics of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Hollywood dreams of consensus, of happy endings and box office unity, but democratic government can present an interminable tale of gridlock, compromise and division. The squalor and vigor, the glory and corruption of the Republic in action have all too rarely made it onto the big screen.

There are exceptions, of course, and one of them is Steven Spielberg’s splendid “Lincoln,” which is, strictly speaking, about a president trying to scare up votes to get a bill passed in Congress. It is of course about a lot more than that, but let’s stick to the basics for now. To say that this is among the finest films ever made about American politics may be to congratulate it for clearing a fairly low bar. Some of the movie’s virtues are, at first glance, modest ones, like those of its hero, who is pleased to present himself as a simple backwoods lawyer, even as his folksy mannerisms mask a formidable and cunning political mind.

After a brutal, kinetic beginning — a scene of muddy, hand-to-hand combat that evokes the opening of “Saving Private Ryan”— “Lincoln” settles down into what looks like the familiar pageantry and speechifying of costume drama. A flock of first-rate character actors parades by in the heavy woolen plumage of the past. The smaller, plainer America of the mid-19th century is evoked by the brownish chiaroscuro of Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography, by the mud, brick and wood of Rick Carter’s production design and by enough important facial hair to make the young beard farmers of 21st-century Brooklyn weep tears of envy.

The most famous and challenging beard of them all sits on the chin of Daniel Day-Lewis, who eases into a role of epic difficulty as if it were a coat he had been wearing for years. It is both a curiosity and a marvel of modern cinema that this son of an Anglo-Irish poet should have become our leading portrayer of archaic Americans. Hawkeye (in “Last of the Mohicans”), Bill the Butcher (“Gangs of New York”), Daniel Plainview (“There Will Be Blood”) — all are figures who live in the dim borderlands of memory and myth, but with his angular frame and craggy features, Mr. Day-Lewis turns them into flesh and blood.

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Common Sense Media Review

Outstanding drama about revered leader's political genius.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Steven Spielberg's Lincoln isn't a biographical chronicle of Abraham Lincoln's (Daniel Day-Lewis) life in office but rather a political drama about the passing of the 13th Amendment and the end of the Civil War. The most sensitive issues in the movie are its depiction of…

Why Age 13+?

As would have been accurate for the era, the words "Negroes," "co

Scenes of the Civil War are mostly shown in passing, but there's definitely

Characters drink liquor (some to excess) and smoke cigars, pipes, and hand-rolle

Mary and Abraham Lincoln embrace.

Any Positive Content?

Lincoln is a tribute to a president who took leadership seriously and knew that,

Lincoln is shown to be a thoughtful, intelligent, generous man who, while not as

As would have been accurate for the era, the words "Negroes," "coons," "coloreds," and "n-----s" are used to describe African Americans. Other strong language is peppered throughout and includes two uses of "f--k," plus "s--t," "bulls--t," "ass," "goddamn," "crap," "damn," "hell," "son of a bitch," and "oh my God."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

Scenes of the Civil War are mostly shown in passing, but there's definitely carnage -- including bodies lying dead across battlefields. Mentions of casualties upset the president and his Cabinet. In an Army hospital, amputee soldiers greet the president, and then two soldiers bury a barrel full of severed limbs -- making Robert Todd Lincoln (and likely many viewers) sick. Although we don't see Lincoln's assassination, he's displayed dead, with a pool of blood surrounding him.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters drink liquor (some to excess) and smoke cigars, pipes, and hand-rolled cigarettes (accurate for the era).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Lincoln is a tribute to a president who took leadership seriously and knew that, for the United States to continue, slavery would need to be abolished -- even if he wasn't personally a die-hard supporter of equal rights. There are also messages about work-life balance, letting children make their own choices, and realizing that all people have worth and a right to their freedom. Additional themes include integrity, courage, humility, and perseverance.

Positive Role Models

Lincoln is shown to be a thoughtful, intelligent, generous man who, while not as pro-equality as the abolitionists, is definitely insistent that the country abolish slavery. But he's not depicted as perfect: He's willing to play the political game of patronage (giving lame-duck Democrats political appointments) in exchange for getting the 13th Amendment passed. Thaddeus Stevens is the most progressive congressman, and he wants nothing short of total equality. The movie doesn't sit in judgment of or demonize the Confederates or Democrats who don't want to abolish slavery; they're depicted as closed-minded men who just can't fathom changing their way of life.

Parents need to know that Steven Spielberg 's Lincoln isn't a biographical chronicle of Abraham Lincoln's ( Daniel Day-Lewis ) life in office but rather a political drama about the passing of the 13th Amendment and the end of the Civil War. The most sensitive issues in the movie are its depiction of war (severed limbs and bloody battlefields filled with dead soldiers are seen) and occasional strong language, including many era-accurate (but hard to hear today) racial epithets. But overall, the violence is much tamer than in war movies like Saving Private Ryan or Glory , and Lincoln is an educational, entertaining drama that even some mature 5th graders might be ready to handle, if they watch with their parents. (That said, it does move somewhat slowly, so kids hooked on fast-paced entertainment may not be interested.) To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (21)
• Kids say (51)

Based on 21 parent reviews

Good to watch as a family--values and civics lessons

If it weren't for the blasphemy the movie would be a 5 star., what's the story.

It's 1865. President Abraham LINCOLN ( Daniel Day-Lewis ) has just been reelected, and it's clear that the Confederacy isn't likely to survive another spring in the ongoing Civil War. But before Lincoln can embrace the likelihood of the South's surrender, he wants -- seemingly more than anything -- to pass the 13th Amendment and definitively outlaw slavery in the entire Union. With the help of Secretary of State William Seward ( David Strathairn ), Lincoln hires three political negotiators ( James Spader , Tim Blake Nelson , and John Hawkes ) to convince at least 20 of the House of Representatives' Democrats (who staunchly oppose the amendment) to vote for the bill (usually in exchange for patronage positions). Meanwhile, in his personal life, Lincoln faces more issues of compromise and sacrifice with his emotional wife, Mary ( Sally Field ), and his desperate-to-enlist son, Robert ( Joseph Gordon-Levitt ).

Is It Any Good?

There's no better film to watch to pay witness to how even our country's greatest historical leaders still had to make quid pro quo overtures across party lines to move forward. Based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's award-winning book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln , Lincoln is more about the political intrigue of Lincoln's final months than a "biopic" about his personal life. Day-Lewis' performance is a brilliant character study of a legendary man. Unlike the over-the-top characters Day-Lewis played in Gangs of New York and There Will Be Blood , his President Lincoln is an introspective man who tells stories that sound like parables and who exudes a powerful dignity, even in silence. As Mary Todd Lincoln, Field makes a passionate case for the First Lady's instability, stemming from the overwhelming grief of losing son Willie.

But one of the most startling performances in the film, which is so eloquently scripted by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, is courtesy of Tommy Lee Jones as Stevens. The uncompromising abolitionist congressman wants complete racial equality -- not just the legal extinction of slavery -- but even he knows that change sometimes comes in baby steps, not revolution.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about why President Lincoln is still considered one of the most influential presidents of all time. How does the movie's depiction of President Lincoln compare to what you know or have learned about him? Did anything surprise you about his political or personal life?

What does the movie tell us about how politics have changed since the 1860s? Do politicians still have to work together and make compromises, even if they fundamentally disagree? What is the continued relevance of the 13th Amendment?

How closely do you think Lincoln adheres to history? How many liberties with the facts do you think a movie like this can take? Why might filmmakers decide to do that?

How do the figures depicted in Lincoln demonstrate perseverance and courage ? What about humility and integrity ? Why are these important character strengths ?

How does Mary Todd Lincoln's emotional fragility -- in no small part spurred by the fear of one of her remaining sons going to fight in the war that her husband considers necessary -- impact Lincoln's situation?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 9, 2012
• On DVD or streaming : March 26, 2013
• Cast : Daniel Day-Lewis , Joseph Gordon-Levitt , Sally Field
• Director : Steven Spielberg
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : DreamWorks
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : History
• Character Strengths : Courage , Humility , Integrity , Perseverance
• Run time : 150 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : an intense scene of war violence, some images of carnage and brief strong language
• Awards : Academy Award , Golden Globe - Golden Globe Award Winner
• Last updated : June 20, 2024

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See all the red-carpet arrivals (updating), ‘lincoln’: film review.

Daniel Day-Lewis stars as the 16th president in the historical drama directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Tony Kushner.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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Far from being a traditional biographical drama, Lincoln dedicates itself to doing something very few Hollywood films have ever attempted, much less succeeded at: showing, from historical example, how our political system works in an intimate procedural and personal manner. That the case in point is the hair-breadth passage by the House of Representatives of the epochal 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and that the principal orchestrator is President Abraham Lincoln in the last days of his life endow Steven Spielberg ‘s film with a great theme and subject, which are honored with intelligence, humor and relative restraint. Tony Kushner ‘s densely packed script has been directed by Spielberg in an efficient, unpretentious way that suggests Michael Curtiz at Warner Bros. in the 1940s, right down to the rogue’s gallery of great character actors in a multitude of bewhiskered supporting roles backing up a first-rate leading performance by Daniel Day-Lewis . The wall-to-wall talk and lack of much Civil War action might give off the aroma of schoolroom medicine to some, but the elemental drama being played out, bolstered by the prestige of the participants and a big push by Disney, should make this rare film about American history pay off commercially.

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First unveiled at an unannounced sneak preview at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 8, Lincoln  will receive its official world premiere on Nov. 8 at the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles in advance of its Nov. 9 limited opening and wider release Nov. 16.

The Bottom Line An absorbing, densely packed, sometimes funny telling of the 16th president's masterful effort in manipulating the passage of the 13th Amendment.

Concentrating on the tumultuous period between January 1865 and the conclusion of the Civil War on April 9 and Lincoln’s assassination five days later, on Good Friday, this is history that plays out mostly in wood-paneled rooms darkened by thick drapes and heavy furniture and, increasingly, in the intimate House chamber where the strength of the anti-abolitionist Democrats will be tested against Lincoln’s moderates and the more zealous anti-slavery radicals of the young Republican Party.

Occasionally, there are glimpses of life outside the inner sanctums of government, first on the battlefield, where black Union troops join in the vicious hand-to-hand combat where the mud renders the gray and blue uniforms all but indistinguishable, then in the dusty streets of the nation’s capital and in the verdant surrounding countryside.

The stiffest challenge facing Kushner was to lay out enough exposition in the early going to give viewers their bearings while simultaneously jump-starting the film’s dramatic movement. Quite a bit of information simply has to be dropped in quickly to get it over with — Mary Todd Lincoln’s continuing depression over the death of a son three years earlier, her husband’s re-election the previous November, the need for Lincoln to win over some 20 Democrats to achieve the two-thirds majority required to pass — but the estimable playwright who won a Pulitzer for 1992’s Angels in America  mostly manages to cover so many mandatory issues by plausibly making them the subjects of the characters’ vivid conversation.

Particularly helpful in this regard are the intimate talks between Lincoln (Day-Lewis) and his most valued adviser, Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn), as well with his party’s founder Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook, a famous Lincoln in his own time). Having signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and gotten easy Senate passage of the 13th Amendment the previous April, Lincoln is determined to push the House to act quickly and put his signature on the new law by Feb. 1, before the war is likely to end.

What follows is a course in political persuasion in all its forms: cajoling, intimidation, promises, horse-trading, strong-arming and intellectual persuasion, down-home style. In conversation and physical movement, Lincoln is a deliberate fellow who takes his time, a country lawyer whose rumpled exterior conceals abiding principles and an iron will, a man of no personal vanity or fancy education who is nevertheless unafraid to cite Euclid, notably in his equation of equality = fairness = justice, with which Lincoln frames the slavery issue.

Fundamentally unhappy in his family life with his almost continually complaining wife Mary (a very good Sally Field ), who despairs of being condemned to “four more years in this terrible house,” and oldest son Robert ( Joseph Gordon-Levitt ), a college lad desperate to enlist in the Army over his parents’ objections, Lincoln seems to find the greatest pleasure in spinning amusing life-lesson yarns dating to his lawyering days. The film accrues much-needed levity from these interludes, less from the stories themselves than from the reactions of his captive audiences; by the third or fourth time Lincoln embarks on one of his tales, the polite attention paid by his listeners has descended to “here-he-goes-again” eye-rolling and ill-concealed smirking.

As he demonstrated in Angels in America, Kushner — who co-wrote Munich for Spielberg — is adept at juggling a huge number of characters without confusion. One of the main subplots details the efforts of three Republican roustabouts (James Spader, John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson) to use any means necessary to change some minds on the Democratic side while at Lincoln’s behest delaying a high-level Confederate delegation making its way to Washington to talk peace. There also are occasional glimpses of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant (Jared Harris) trying to discern whether the South is ready to call it quits.

But increasingly, attention focuses on Pennsylvania Rep. Thaddeus Stevens ( Tommy Lee Jones ), a lifelong activist for absolute equality among the races philosophically opposed to going along with a watered-down law. The loss of his and other radical Republicans’ support would spell disaster for Lincoln who, in all events, faces a massive challenge that calls on all the political, personal and persuasive skills he has honed over a lifetime.

At the film’s center, then, lies one of the remarkable characters in world history at the critical moment of his life. As Walt Whitman said of Lincoln (as he did of himself), “he contained multitudes,” and Day-Lewis’ sly, slow-burn performance wonderfully fulfills this description. Gangly, grizzled and, as his wife was known to say, “not pretty,” this Lincoln plainly shows his humble origins and is more disheveled than his Washington colleagues. With an astonishing physical resemblance to the real man, Day-Lewis excels when shifting into what was perhaps Lincoln’s most comfortable mode, that of frisky storyteller, especially in the way he seems to anticipate and relish his listeners’ reactions.

But he also is a hard-nosed negotiator with that critical attribute of great politicians in a democracy: an unyielding inner core of principle cloaked by a strategic willingness to compromise in the interests of getting his way. A long scene in which he hashes things out with his cabinet (the single most explicit evocation of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals, the one credited partial source of the screenplay) vividly exhibits his skills in action. The rare moments when Lincoln loses his temper are startling but also hint that his outbursts might be preplanned for effect.

Lincoln seems most ill-at-ease in domestic exchanges with his family, especially with his harping wife, to whose repetitive complaints her husband cannot possibly invent any new answers, even if her sorrow is rooted in genuine depression.

The dramatic and raucous vote on the 13th Amendment is both exhilarating and unexpectedly humorous, with much shouting, threatening and fist-waving, fence-straddling Democrats being shamed by their colleagues and a gallery audience (including some blacks) hanging on every yeah and nay, climaxed, of course, by the exaltation of victory. Appomattox, with proud Gen. Robert E. Lee high on his white horse, is briefly shown, and Kushner and Spielberg have invented a novel way of portraying the fateful events at Ford’s Theatre that doesn’t even show John Wilkes Booth.

For whatever reason, the filmmakers have skipped the ripe opportunity to portray one of the most extraordinary and haunting episodes of this entire period, that of Lincoln’s nearly solitary early-morning walk through the streets of Richmond. The partly burning city had just been abandoned by the Confederate government, and Lincoln increasingly became surrounded by awestruck, suddenly free blacks who could scarcely believe who had just entered their midst, some reacting as if he were Jesus incarnate. Finally arriving at the capitol building, he entered the office of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, sat in his chair and quietly drank a glass of water.

In the event, Spielberg directs in a to-the-point, self-effacing style, with only minor instances of artificially inflated emotionalism and a humor that mostly undercuts eruptions of self-importance. It’s a conscientious piece of work very much in the service of the material, in the manner of the good old Hollywood pros, without frills or grandiosity. At the same time, however, it lacks that final larger dimension and poetic sense such as can be found in John Ford’s great 1939 Young Mr. Lincoln, to which Spielberg’s film is a biographical and thematic bookend.

Further helping matters is the mostly subdued score by John Williams, whose over-the-top contribution to War Horse last year proved so counterproductive to that film’s effect. Working predominantly in shades of blue and black, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski takes a similarly straightforward approach, while the period evocation achieved by many hands led by production designer Rick Carter, costume designer Joanna Johnston and the makeup and hair team is detailed and lacking in embalmed fastidiousness.

Other than Day-Lewis, acting honors go to Jones, who clearly relishes the rich role of Stevens and whose crusty smarts prove both formidable and funny. Very much a good guy here, Stevens in earlier cinematic days was always portrayed as an extremist villain, both in The Birth of a Nation and in the odd 1943 Andrew Johnson biographical drama Tennessee Johnson.

Venue: AFI Film Festival (closing night) Release: Friday, Nov. 9 (Disney/Touchstone) Production: DreamWorks, 20th Century Fox, Reliance Entertainment , Amblin Entertainment , Kennedy/Marshall Productions Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, James Spader, Hal Holbrook, Tommy Lee Jones, John Hawkes, Jackie Earle Haley, Bruce McGill, Tim Blake Nelson, Joseph Cross, Jared Harris, Lee Pace Director: Steven Spielberg Screenwriter: Tony Kushner, based in part on the the book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln , by Doris Kearns Goodwin Producers: Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy Executive producers: Daniel Lupi, Jeff Skoll, Jonathan King Director of photography: Janusz Kaminski Production designer: Rick Carter Costume designer: Joanna Johnston Editor: Michael Kahn Music: John Williams Rated PG-13, 149 minutes

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Daniel Day-Lewis delivers an unimpeachable performance in Steven Spielberg's shrewd, stately and somewhat stuffy drama focused on a narrow yet defining chapter of Abraham Lincoln's life: abolishing slavery via the passage of a Constitutional amendment.

By Peter Debruge

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Abraham Lincoln may not technically be the subject of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” but Daniel Day-Lewis is inarguably its star, delivering an unimpeachable performance as the United States’ 16th president in a shrewd, stately and somewhat stuffy drama focused on a narrow yet defining chapter of Lincoln’s life: abolishing slavery via the passage of a Constitutional amendment. Though historians will surely find room to quibble, every choice Day-Lewis makes lends dignity and gravitas to America’s most revered figure, resulting in an event movie whose commercial and critical fate rides on the reputations of not just Lincoln, but the esteemed creative team as well.

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Too seldom does American cinema deal with the country’s most shameful policy: the paradox by which a nation founded on equality might allow the subjugation and servitude of one race to persist for nearly a century. Spielberg, however, has faced the issue head-on, not just once (“ The Color Purple “) or twice (“Amistad”), but three times, confronting it most directly — at the very core of the policy — in “Lincoln.” The title functions as something of a misnomer, considering that the president here serves as the instrument to emancipation and not the actual focus of the film, as if “Amistad” had been released as “Quincy Adams.”

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Liberally adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin ‘s 2005 book “Team of Rivals,” Tony Kushner ‘s script dramatizes the behind-the-scenes story of the wheeling and dealing required to pass the 13th Amendment — undoubtedly the legacy for which Lincoln hoped to be remembered, not realizing how compelling audiences would find every aspect of his private life 144 years later.

The theater-trained scribe, who previously co-wrote “Munich” for the director, defies what admirers expect of a Spielberg-made Lincoln biopic. In place of vicarious emotion and tour de force filmmaking, “Lincoln” offers a largely static intellectual reappraisal of the great orator, limiting not only the scenery chewing but also the scenery itself in what amounts to Spielberg’s most play-like production yet; it’s a style that will keep many viewers at arm’s length.

Emphasizing talk over action, Kushner concentrates on Lincoln’s strategy of forcing an unpopular and recently defeated policy through a lame-duck House of Representatives. Enlisting three buffoonish vote-buyers (James Spader, John Hawkes and Tim Blake Nelson ), the executive doesn’t hesitate to exploit his immense powers, which extend to offering cushy government jobs, pardons and other presidential privileges to those willing to embrace his position.

This is politics as it is really played, yet few writers have found a way to make it as compelling as Kushner does here. That success owes in part to the extensive character-actor ensemble Spielberg and casting director Avy Kaufman have enlisted, repaying them with dramatic roles for not only Lincoln’s entire cabinet (most prominently David Strathairn as Secretary of State William Seward), but more than a dozen key allies and opponents of the 13th Amendment, including Lee Pace as a showboating Democrat, Michael Stuhlbarg as a conscience-conflicted swing voter and David Costabile as the doubting Thomas among Lincoln’s closest supporters.

Despite occasional digressions into spectacular but artificial-looking Civil War battlefields, the action is rowdiest on the floor of Congress, where Republican representative Thaddeus Stevens ( Tommy Lee Jones ) trades scathing barbs with such ideological rivals as George Pendleton (Peter McRobbie, who more closely resembles frown-creased portraits of the real-life Stevens than Jones does). Though the film inevitably deals with Lincoln’s assassination, notably played offscreen, the climax comes during the Congressional vote itself, in which Spielberg allows the names of history’s heroes to ring out the way he previously did those saved on Schindler’s list. Even more effective is the way Kushner integrates the full text of the Gettysburg Address and the 13th Amendment into the body of the film.

Still, since audiences inevitably prefer personal intrigue to the inner workings of politics, Kushner laces “Lincoln” with details about first lady “Molly” ( Sally Field ), as Abe called his wife, Mary, and sons Tad (Gulliver McGrath) and Robert (Joseph Gordon Levitt), who withdraws from Harvard in order to enlist in the Union army, despite his father’s adamant demands to the contrary. Still, these human-interest scenes seem to get in the way of the story at hand, offering valuable, intimate glimpses of the Lincolns as seldom seen before, yet inorganic to the abolition of slavery — save one powerful scene, when Mary, having already lost one son and loathe to watch Robert perish in the Civil War, publicly threatens her husband, “If you fail to acquire the necessary votes, woe unto you, you will have to answer to me.” Spielberg and Kushner hold this truth to be self-evident: that behind every powerful man is a woman pushing him toward greatness.

Informed largely by Goodwin’s research, “Lincoln” presents an image of the president very different from the melancholy figure so often seen before. Such crushing grief falls instead to Field, whose long-suffering Mary endured debilitating migraines and deep depression after the death of their son Willie, but also scandalously overspent in her efforts to outfit the White House — and herself — to a level she felt befitting the first family. Curiously, Mary was a decade Abraham’s junior, though Field is actually a decade older than Day-Lewis, creating an odd, almost maternal dynamic between the two actors.

Meanwhile, Day-Lewis plays Lincoln as a physically awkward but not unhandsome figure, gentle with his children, uncomfortable with ceremony (his disdain of calfskin gloves becomes a running joke), and firm when needed with colleagues who could not always see the wisdom in the man some considered “the capitulating compromiser.” This Lincoln is a lover of theater and avid raconteur who easily quotes from Shakespeare and scripture, a man who problem-solves via storytelling — an impression that naturally flatters those in Spielberg and Kushner’s profession.

Perhaps that explains the staginess of “Lincoln’s” telling, right down to the creak of the boards under the great orator’s feet and d.p. Janusz Kaminski ‘s conservative framing, which recalls either classic prosceniums or heavily shadowed Renaissance paintings. Though incongruous with the psychological realism that Kushner, through elevated dialogue, aims to achieve, this iconic style suits such a beloved persona.

And yet, Lincoln’s life takes a backseat to the ideological battle between two opposing ideas — an end to slavery, or an end to war. The result looks as much like a Natural History Museum diorama as it sounds: a respectful but waxy re-creation that feels somehow awe-inspiring yet chillingly lifeless to behold, the great exception being Jones’ alternately blistering and sage turn as Stevens.

Production values are as elegant as one would expect from Spielberg, grittier but no less impressionistic than last year’s “War Horse.” John Williams’ score, which seemingly incorporates hymns, marches and other period music, offers vital but unobtrusive support.

• Production: A Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures release of a DreamWorks Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Reliance Entertainment presentation in association with Participant Media and Dune Entertainment of an Amblin Entertainment/Kennedy/Marshall Co. production. Produced by Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy. Executive producers, Jonathan King, Daniel Lupi, Jeff Skoll. Co-producers, Kristie Macosko Krieger, Adam Somner. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Screenplay, Tony Kushner, based in part on the book "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln" by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
• Crew: Camera (Deluxe color, widescreen), Janusz Kaminski; editor, Michael Kahn; music, John Williams; production designer, Rick Carter; art directors, Curt Beech, David Crank, Leslie McDonald; set decorator, Jim Erickson; costume designer, Joanna Johnston; sound (Dolby Digital/SDDS/Datasat), Ron Judkins; sound designer, Ben Burtt; supervising sound editor, Richard Hymns; re-recording mixers, Andy Nelson, Gary Rydstrom; special effects coordinator, Steve Cremin; visual effects supervisors, Ben Morris, Garan Miljkovich; visual effects, Framestore, the Garage VFX; stunt coordinator, Garrett Warren; assistant director, Adam Somner; casting, Avy Kaufman. Reviewed at Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, Calif., Oct. 25, 2012. (In AFI Fest -- closer.) MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 149 MIN.
• With: Abraham Lincoln - Daniel Day-Lewis Mary Todd Lincoln - Sally Field Secretary of State William Seward - David Strathairn Robert Todd Lincoln - Joseph Gordon-Levitt WN Bilbo - James Spader Francis Preston Blair - Hal Holbrook Thaddeus Stevens - Tommy Lee Jones Fernando Wood - Lee Pace George Zeaman - Michael Stuhlbarg James Ashley - David Costabile Alexander Stephens - Jackie Earle Haley Lydia Smith - S. Epatha Merkerson Ulysses S. Grant - Jared Harris With: John Hawkes, Walton Goggins, Bruce McGill, David Oyelowo, Julie White, Adam Driver, Gulliver McGrath, Tim Blake Nelson, Gregory Itzin, Gloria Reuben, Jeremy Strong, Christopher Boyer, John Hutton.

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Metacritic reviews

• 100 Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman The movie is grand and immersive. It plugs us into the final months of Lincoln's presidency with a purity that makes us feel transported as though by time machine.
• 100 Time Out Joshua Rothkopf Time Out Joshua Rothkopf Defiantly intellectual, complex and true to the shifting winds of real-world governance, Lincoln is not the movie that this election season has earned-but one that a more perfect union can aspire to.
• 90 New York Magazine (Vulture) David Edelstein New York Magazine (Vulture) David Edelstein Lincoln is too sharply focused to deserve the pejorative "biopic" label. It's splendid enough to make me wish Spielberg would make a "prequel" to this instead of another Indiana Jones picture.
• 90 Village Voice Chris Packham Village Voice Chris Packham This Lincoln, stunningly portrayed by Spielberg and Day-Lewis, is real and relatable and so, so cool.
• 88 Slant Magazine R. Kurt Osenlund Slant Magazine R. Kurt Osenlund Steven Spielberg's film may further the heroism so associated with its subject, and favor a liberal viewpoint that leers down at the Confederates, but it's no bleeding-heart glamorization.
• 80 The Guardian The Guardian If only modern American politics were remotely as entertaining.
• 80 The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy Tony Kushner's densely packed script has been directed by Spielberg in an efficient, unpretentious way that suggests Michael Curtiz at Warner Bros. in the 1940s, right down to the rogue's gallery of great character actors in a multitude of bewhiskered supporting roles backing up a first-rate leading performance by Daniel Day-Lewis.
• 80 Boxoffice Magazine Pete Hammond Boxoffice Magazine Pete Hammond This is not really a biopic of the great President as the title might indicate, but rather a fascinating, savvy look at the inner-workings of the political process and how things in the White House get - or don't get - done.
• 70 Variety Peter Debruge Variety Peter Debruge The result looks as much like a Natural History Museum diorama as it sounds: a respectful but waxy re-creation that feels somehow awe-inspiring yet chillingly lifeless to behold, the great exception being Jones' alternately blistering and sage turn as Stevens.
• 50 Observer Rex Reed Observer Rex Reed Lincoln is also a colossal bore. It is so pedantic, slow-moving, sanitized and sentimental that I kept pinching myself to stay awake - which, like the film itself, didn't always work.
• See all 45 reviews on Metacritic.com
• See all external reviews for Lincoln

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The legislative process has never been this dramatic—or this fun.

Photo by David James – © 2012 - DreamWorks II Distribution Co. All Rights Reserved.

Lincoln feels like a movie Steven Spielberg has always been fated to make. Of course these two figures were bound to collide at some point: the most mythic of American presidents and the most myth-making of American  filmmakers. The values Abraham Lincoln has come to represent in the collective imagination—freedom, equality, justice, mercy—are the same values Spielberg has spent a career celebrating and not infrequently sentimentalizing.

Lincoln does sometimes get a little sappy around the edges. Though his project here is clearly one of conscious self-restraint, Spielberg can’t resist the occasional opportunity for patriotic tear-jerking, usually signaled by a swell of John Williams’ symphonic score. But in between, there are long stretches that are as quiet, contemplative, and austere as anything Spielberg has ever done.

In large part, this quality of austerity derives from the fact that Abraham Lincoln is played by Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor who is to other actors as Nijinsky was to other dancers of his time: He seems to be engaging in a different art form entirely. Day-Lewis’ embodiment of Lincoln is less a portrait than a sculpture. You can walk around it and see different things from different angles. The character is so fully imagined, so lived from the inside out, that we leave feeling we’ve met and briefly known, if not Lincoln himself, certainly someone real and extraordinary. This isn’t a Hollywood-style historical epic, like War Horse or Amistad —it’s history on an intimate domestic scale, Lincoln wandering the halls of the White House wrapped in an old wool blanket.

Lincoln does begin on a grand scale, with a horrific, mercifully short depiction of the realities of Civil War-era battle (a swarm of confused, frightened men hacking at one another with bayonets and drowning each other in puddles). Immediately after, we witness the 16th president at the front, greeting two pairs of war-weary Union soldiers, one black, one white. The on-the-nose parallelism of this scene—and the unlikelihood that two separate soldiers would h ave independently memorized the Gettysburg address, and have the presence of mind to quote it in full back to its author after a brutal battle—gets the film off to an unpromising start. Is this going to be a stiffly inspirational civics diorama?

Blessedly, we soon move into the main storyline, which focuses very tightly on the last few months of Lincoln’s life, as he struggled both to end the Civil War and to pass the 13 th Amendment abolishing slavery. The script by Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner draws heavily (though not exclusively) on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s best-selling book Team of Rivals , which is about Lincoln’s clashes with his Cabinet over how to accomplish these two seemingly complementary, but in reality conflicting, goals. Would it be better for the Union to negotiate an end to the war first, or to use the promise of peace as leverage to get the amendment passed? Is Lincoln’s primary moral duty as a leader to end the soldiers’ suffering with all possible speed, or to ensure that the abolition of slavery is permanently written into the Constitution? The moral, legal, and political questions raised by Lincoln’s Scylla/Charybdis dilemma are the meat of the story here—and if that means most of Lincoln’s moments of high suspense occur in offices and legislative chambers, well, Kushner is writer enough, and Spielberg director enough, to turn vote-wrangling and strategic political chicanery into both wry comedy and high drama.

Advised by Secretary of State William Seward (a superb David Strathairn), who despairs of his boss’s habit of first seeking, then ignoring, his advice, Lincoln tries everything to get a two-thirds majority vote, from personally strong-arming reluctant legislators to hiring a team of Falstaffian secret operatives (James Spader, John Hawkes, and Tim Blake Nelson) to offer patronage jobs in exchange for votes. The vision of Lincoln as a world-class horse-trader, capable of deploying slippery lawyer’s tricks in the service of lofty goals, animates many of the movie’s sharpest and funniest scenes. And though Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is a surpassingly gentle, soft-spoken man, given to long homespun anecdotes and bone-dry witticisms, there are scenes in which Lincoln more than justifies his reputation among many of his contemporaries as a steel-willed autocrat seeking to usurp the powers of the legislative branch.

In its second half, the film focuses increasingly on Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), a Pennsylvania congressman who’s spent his life battling for full racial equality. Stevens’ opposition to the amendment on the grounds that it doesn’t go far enough endangers its passage, and he and his fellow lawmakers square off repeatedly over the meaning and necessity of political compromise. Decked out in a curled black wig and limping on a cane, hurling poetic invective at his opponents (“Slavery is the only insult to natural law, you fatuous nincompoop!”), Jones gives a magnificent performance that should have his best supporting actor nomination in the bag. The climactic voting scene in the House chamber is a rowdy mélange of low comedy, high drama, and suspense—though we know, of course, that the amendment will pass in the end, Spielberg and Kushner have so ably orchestrated the stories of multiple sought-after votes that each “Aye” or “Nay” plays out like a miniature cliffhanger.

The movie’s depiction of its president’s enigmatic domestic life is only intermittently successful. There are some blisteringly honest scenes between Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Field), his depressed, resentful, but politically savvy wife. The portrait of the Lincolns’ marriage is remarkably complex, especially in the scenes where she rebukes him for insufficiently mourning their dead son. We see how her bottomless neediness and his core of emotional reserve made for a toxic combination, but we also sense their deep love for each other. I never quite believed in the storyline about Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the Lincoln’s oldest son Robert, who insists on enlisting in the Army against his parents’ wishes—their Oedipal squabbles seemed familiar from too many other, lesser movies. But the tender, lively relationship between Lincoln and his adored youngest son, Tad (Gulliver McGrath), runs through the movie like an animating spark, with the boy racing through Cabinet meetings to leap on his ever-tolerant father’s lap. An early, quiet scene in which Lincoln finds his child sleeping by the fireside, lies full-length next to him and kisses him was the movie’s “had me at hello” moment for me—from that point, I could tabulate its flaws as it went along while still loving every minute of it.

Well, all but the last few minutes, in which we see not quite Lincoln’s assassination but a related event taking place at the same time. I admire Spielberg’s choice to conclude on a note of indirection and discretion: Ending on a tableaux vivant of the well-known facts of that night at Ford’s Theatre might have been both dramatically inert and crass. But I think the film should have ended even earlier, on a long shot (beautifully framed by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski) of the lanky, stooped president walking alone down a hall of the White House, on the way to take his wife to the theater on April 14, 1865, five days after ending the bloodiest war in the nation’s history. We all know what happened next—and given how much we love this man we feel we’ve come to know, it’s sad enough just thinking about it.

Lincoln: “It’s true because it works”

At the heart of Steven Spielberg’s “ Lincoln ” is a quiet scene between President Abraham Lincoln ( Daniel Day-Lewis ) and two young men, Samuel Beckwith (Adam Driver) and David Homer Bates (Drew Sease), in an otherwise empty telegraph cipher office. Lincoln has to make a crucial decision: Does he consider a peace proposal from a Confederate delegation on its way to Washington, and thus perhaps immediately end the bloody Civil War that has claimed the lives of more than half a million Americans, knowing that it would doom his attempt to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, officially banning slavery in the United States? Or does he try to legally solidify and extend his Emancipation Proclamation by getting the Thirteenth Amendment passed during a narrow window of opportunity (during the lame duck session of Congress between his re-election and second inauguration) at the cost of extending the war?

Invoking language from the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”), Lincoln thinks out loud, asking the young men philosophical questions and telling a story about… geometry. The movie, written by Tony Kushner (“ Munich ,” “Angels in America”) and “based in part” on the nonfiction book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (you can view/download .pdf of script here — I highly recommend reading it after you’ve seen the movie), achieves an exquisite balance of language and imagery:

LINCOLN Euclid’s first common notion is this: “Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.” Homer doesn’t get it; neither does Sam. LINCOLN (CONT’D) That’s a rule of mathematical reasoning. It’s true because it works; has done and always will do. In his book, Euclid says this is “self-evident.” (a beat) D’you see? There it is, even in that two-thousand year old book of mechanical law: it is a self- evident truth that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. We begin with equality. That’s the origin, isn’t it? That balance, that’s fairness, that’s justice.

The term “ triangulation ,” as it is used in politics, is said to be a dirty word, a cynical tactic. But in this case, as one modern strategist phrased it , “isn’t about compromising on principles or policies, but about preempting conservative wedge issues by addressing them through progressive policies” — or, finding a way to accomplish your goals without alienating one side or another, through careful use of language and limits. This may involve strategic tradeoffs or compromises on short-term goals in order to position yourself to accomplish greater ones in the future. Think about the practical, empirical wisdom in those words: It’s true because it works.

“Lincoln” weaves images of such triangulation through the entire film. (Spoilers.) It’s even there in the visual positioning of the three men in the telegraph room, and in the last sentence of the speech above: balance, fairness, justice. It’s there in the House of Representatives, with the Lincoln Republicans on one side of the chamber, the opposition Democrats on the other and the Speaker (or the member holding the floor) at the front, moderating between them. At times, the apex of the triangle is reversed, shifted to a point in the balcony at the rear of the hall, where Mrs. Lincoln ( Sally Field ) or various Negro citizens might be witnessing the historic proceedings.

And Lincoln must emotionally triangulate between his son Robert ( Joseph Gordon-Levitt ), who wants to join the Union army, and his wife, who fears losing another son. If Robert were to die, she says, “How would I ever forgive you?” And should they forbid him to enlist, Lincoln says, “You imagine Robert will forgive us if we continue to stifle his very natural ambition?”

The movie is essentially about the “political genius” behind the party of Lincoln’s maneuvering to get the Thirteenth Amendment through the House. Among the methods employed are barters, bribes, bait, betrayal, backpedaling and blackmail — or, more or less, tactics redolent of those things. As staunch abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens ( Tommy Lee Jones ) phrases it: “The greatest measure of the Nineteenth Century. Passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America.”

So, is “Lincoln” simply an endorsement of the argument that the end justifies the means? No, it’s not that simple. Stevens, for example, is a lifelong advocate of full citizenship rights for black Americans, yet Lincoln asks that he temper his remarks before the House “so as not to frighten our conservative friends?” The conservatives fear that banning slavery is the first step down the proverbial slippery slope, leading to enfranchisement not only for Negro males but — horror of horror! — for women! (Sure enough, black men got the right to vote with the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870 — though Jim Crow laws preventing them from voting in some states were not officially abolished until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Women did not obtain suffrage until the ratification of the Nineteeth Amendment in 1920.)

In the interest in winning the short-term battle, so that the greater ones can be fought another day, Stevens winds up compromising his own views, repeating the carefully worded statement when the Democrats attempt to get him to declare his belief in “full equality”: “I don’t hold with equality in all things only with equality before the law and nothing more.” At least he gets a triumphant rhetorical victory when he turns the tables on his interrogator:

How can I hold that all men are created equal, when here before me stands stinking the moral carcass of the gentleman from Ohio, proof that some men are inferior, endowed by their Maker with dim wits impermeable to reason with cold pallid slime in their veins instead of hot red blood! You are more reptile than man, George, so low and flat that the foot of man is incapable of crushing you! […] Yet even you, Pendleton, who should have been gibbetted for treason long before today, even worthless unworthy you ought to be treated equally before the law!

Afterwards, Stevens — visibly depleted by the compromise he’s been forced to make, is accosted by abolitionist colleague Asa Vintner Litton (Steven Spinella), who shames him for denying Negro equality: “Have you lost your very soul, Mr. Stevens? Is there nothing you won’t say?” Stevens responds in a rock-solid, measured tone: “I want the amendment to pass. So that the Constitution’s first and only mention of slavery is its absolute prohibition. For this amendment, for which I have worked all of my life and for which countless colored men and women have fought and died and now hundreds of thousands of soldiers — no, sir, no, it seems there is very nearly nothing I won’t say.”

There’s a time to speak out, and there’s a time to hold your tongue in service of a larger strategy, greater goals. In one of the movie’s most beautiful speeches (delivered with a warmth and subtlety I did not expect from an actor as bombastic as Day-Lewis), Lincoln describes his constitutional predicament and tells a story about having to navigate through several contingencies and to make arguments he did not believe in so that he could affirm greater principles that he did, as when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation:

LINCOLN … I decided that the Constitution gives me war powers, but no one knows just exactly what those powers are. Some say they don’t exist. I don’t know. I decided I needed them to exist to uphold my oath to protect the Constitution, which I decided meant that I could take the rebels’ slaves from ’em as property confiscated in war. That might recommend to suspicion that I agree with the rebs that their slaves are property in the first place. Of course I don’t, never have, I’m glad to see any man free, and if calling a man property, or war contraband, does the trick… Why I caught at the opportunity. Now here’s where it gets truly slippery. I use the law allowing for the seizure of property in a war knowing it applies only to the property of governments and citizens of belligerent nations. But the South ain’t a nation, that’s why I can’t negotiate with ’em. So if in fact the Negroes are property according to law, have I the right to take the rebels’ property from ’em, if I insist they’re rebels only, and not citizens of a belligerent country? And slipperier still: I maintain it ain’t our actual Southern states in rebellion, but only the rebels living in those states, the laws of which states remain in force. The laws of which states remain in force. That means, that since it’s states’ laws that determine whether Negroes can be sold as slaves, as property — the Federal government doesn’t have a say in that, least not yet — a glance at Seward, then: — then Negroes in those states are slaves, hence property, hence my war powers allow me to confiscate ’em as such. So I confiscated ’em. But if I’m a respecter of states’ laws, how then can I legally free ’em with my Proclamation, as I done, unless I’m cancelling states’ laws? I felt the war demanded it; my oath demanded it; I felt right with myself; and I hoped it was legal to do it, I’m hoping still. He looks around the table. Everyone’s listening. 
Two years ago I proclaimed these people emancipated — “then, thenceforward and forever free.” But let’s say the courts decide I had no authority to do it. They might well decide that. Say there’s no amendment abolishing slavery. Say it’s after the war, and I can no longer use my war powers to just ignore the courts’ decisions, like I sometimes felt I had to do. Might those people I freed be ordered back into slavery? That’s why I’d like to get the Thirteenth Amendment through the House, and on its way to ratification by the states, wrap the whole slavery thing up, forever and aye. As soon as I’m able. Now . End of this month. And I’d like you to stand behind me. Like my cabinet’s most always done. A moment’s silence, broken by a sharp laugh from Seward. LINCOLN (CONT’D) As the preacher said, I could write shorter sermons but once I start I get too lazy to stop.

There’s the triangulation motif again — using the logic of indirection, not unlike the ways a magician might use skillful distraction to pull off a little sleight-of-hand. It’s introduced in the opening scene (after a brief montage of filthy, bloody battle), which finds Lincoln talking with two black Union soldiers, Private Harold Green ( Colman Domingo ) and Corporal Ira Clark ( David Oyelowo )– the former personable and polite, the latter making full use of the opportunity to push the President for greater equality beginning with equal pay for colored soldiers, then Negro commissioned officers and, maybe in a hundred years, the vote. Lincoln attempts to chart a course between them, to keep the conversation light and convivial by making jokes about his haircut, while acknowledging his awareness that the Union still has a long way to go with civil rights.

Suddenly, the triangle expands as a pair of nervous white soldiers ( Lukas Haas and Dane DeHaan ) appear on the other side of Lincoln and nervously begin trying to outdo each other in reciting the Gettysburg Address . Corporal Clark concludes the scene, and the conversation, by reciting the rest of the Gettysburg Address as he walks off to rejoin his regiment, letting Lincoln know just how closely he holds those ideals to his heart.

A few more things about “Lincoln”:

I can’t think of another movie that looks quite like this — the interiors in cold, dark shades of blue and green, brown and black; hints of sepia in the pale lamplight and wintery, filtered sunlight. These spaces where backroom deals are plotted and struck are shrouded in smoke and shadows. The public arena of the House chamber is illuminated by the light of day, but the hidden agendas at play are no less murky.

Finally, I want to tip my stovepipe hat to Daniel Day-Lewis for what I believe is his finest performance since “ My Left Foot ” — which, I think, was the first time I saw him. I have not been a fan of his calculating, showboating, “Look-at-me-I’m-acting!” style (like Olivier, another “great British actor,” , but here I felt he was completely immersed in the character. For once, I forgot I was watching DDL, and really felt like I was in the presence of Abraham Lincoln. (Hey, is this what we were supposed to feel in Disneyland’s audio-animatronic “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln”?) Seriously, I think it’s a great performance — tender, sad, warm, ferocious. But that’s the character of the man he’s playing. It’s a breakthrough for the actor, I think — like when Meryl Streep finally warmed up in “ Silkwood .” I hope Mr. Day-Lewis wins some prestigious awards for his work in this picture.

Jim Emerson

Jim Emerson is the founding editor of RogerEbert.com and has written lots of things in lots of places over lots of years. Mostly involving movies.

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Review: Steven Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’ a towering achievement

Kenneth Turan reviews ‘Lincoln’.

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Hollywood’s most successful director turns on a dime and delivers his most restrained, interior film. A celebrated playwright shines an illuminating light on no more than a sliver of a great man’s life. A brilliant actor surpasses even himself and makes us see a celebrated figure in ways we hadn’t anticipated. This is the power and the surprise of “Lincoln.”

Directed by Steven Spielberg, written by Tony Kushner and starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president of the United States, “Lincoln” unfolds during the final four months of the chief executive’s life as he focuses his energies on a dramatic struggle that has not previously loomed large in political mythology: his determination to get the House of Representatives to pass the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery.

This narrow focus has paradoxically enabled us to see Lincoln whole in a way a more broad-ranging film might have been unable to match. It has also made for a movie whose pleasures are subtle ones, that knows how to reveal the considerable drama inherent in the overarching battle of big ideas over the amendment as well as the small-bore skirmishes of political strategy and the nitty-gritty scramble for congressional votes.

VIDEO: ‘Lincoln’ trailer

These things all begin, as thoughtful films invariably do, with an excellent script. A Pulitzer Prize-winner for “Angels in America,” Kushner has always been adept at illuminating the interplay of the personal and the political. His literate screenplay, based on parts of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Lincoln,” is smart, dramatic and confident of the value of what it has to say.

Kushner has worked with Spielberg before (he co-wrote the Oscar-nominated “Munich” script) and his writing seems to bring out a level of restraint in their productions. There is nothing bravura or overly emotional about Spielberg’s direction here, but the impeccable filmmaking is no less impressive for being quiet and to the point. The director delivers selfless, pulled-back satisfactions: he’s there in service of the script and the acting, to enhance the spoken word rather than burnish his reputation.

The key speaker, obviously, is Day-Lewis. No one needs to be told at this late date what a consummate actor he is, but even those used to the way he disappears into roles will be startled by the marvelously relaxed way he morphs into this character and simply becomes Lincoln. While his heroic qualities are visible when they’re needed, Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is a deeply human individual, stooped and weary after four years of civil war but endowed with a palpable largeness of spirit and a genuine sense of humor.

PHOTOS: Lessons from the campaign trail -- on film

At ease in his own skin, Lincoln wears a shawl around the White House like he was born with it and is so prone to telling tales at every opportunity that his fed-up Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Bruce McGill) snaps in exasperation, “No, you’re not going to tell a story. I can’t bear to hear one.”

Though Day-Lewis’ work inevitably towers over “Lincoln,” one of the remarkable things about this production is not only how consistently good the acting is across some 145 speaking roles but how much the actors have been cast both for ability and resemblance to their historical counterparts, from major players such as Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) and firebrand Congressman Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) down to minor characters like amendment opponent Fernando Wood (Lee Pace) and Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay (Jeremy Strong).

Working with his usual team of equals — cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, production designer Rick Carter, editor Michael Kahn, costume designer Joanna Johnston and composer John Williams — Spielberg has paid particular attention to creating a realistic world for his characters to inhabit, seeping us in the period and seeing to it that the color scheme and the muted lighting enhance the film’s naturalistic palette.

BUZZMETER: How ‘Lincoln’ is holding up in the awards race

Care was taken with the physical details as well, especially the interior of the White House, where Lincoln’s office was re-created with complete accuracy, and where the president interacts with his family, trying to placate his ever-emotional wife Mary (a convincing Sally Field), distraught after the death of their young son Willie, as well as oldest son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who is desperate to enlist in the Union Army against his parents’ wishes.

The political core of “Lincoln” begins with the president’s determination, much to the displeasure of close advisor Seward, to get the House to pass the 13th Amendment. Fearful that the previously enacted Emancipation Proclamation might not stand up to legal challenges, Lincoln gets surprisingly steely as he insists that this simply must be done if slavery is to be permanently eradicated. The problem is getting the votes.

To help make this happen, Seward brings in a trio of arm-twisters, the 1860s versions of today’s lobbyists, who are charged by a president not shy about saying he is “clothed in immense power” to use any means necessary to round up the needed congressional votes. This trio, amusingly played by John Hawkes, James Spader and Tim Blake Nelson, are as close to comic relief as “Lincoln” gets.

THE ENVELOPE: Latest awards news

Because the stakes are so high, and because he turns out to be a master strategist, the president himself inevitably gets personally involved in playing politics. He deals with key leaders like Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook), a conservative Republican who is eager for peace talks with the South, and of course Jones’ Stevens, an irascible, vitriolic abolitionist (“the meanest man in Congress” according to Roy Blount Jr.) who is just getting warmed up when he calls an opponent a “fatuous nincompoop.”

One of the surprises and the pleasures of “Lincoln” is its portrait of the president as a man gifted at reconciling irreconcilable points of view, someone who wouldn’t hesitate to play both ends against the middle and even stretch the truth in the service of the greater good.

Kushner has said that he wrote “Lincoln” because, upset at today’s endemic lack of faith in governance, he wanted to tell a story that “shows that you can achieve miraculous, beautiful things through the democratic system.” It’s a lesson that couldn’t be more timely, or more thoroughly dramatic.

MPAA rating: PG-13 for an intense scene of war violence, some images of carnage and brief strong language

Running time: 2 hours, 29 minutes

Playing: In limited release

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Lincoln Reviews

Spielberg's epic plays like The West Wing in stovepipe hats, and although it may be a little stolid for some, the film brings to life a moment of 19th-century political brinkmanship in captivating style.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 12, 2024

Daniel Day-Lewis delivers a performance for the ages in Steven Spielberg's solid historical drama. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 9, 2024

Lincoln is immersive and respectable, and one of Spielberg’s most disciplined undertakings as a filmmaker.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 21, 2022

While this isn’t a movie dependent on flashy visuals, Spielberg still gives a lot of attention to details. He also goes to great lengths to make this the most vivid portrayal of the 16th president ever to be put on film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 23, 2022

As a whole, "Lincoln" is a monumental effort that can be valued on an assortment of levels.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 11, 2022

Lincoln is a triumph.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 8, 2022

... Spielberg and company are more interested in the work behind the scenes, and they present it with flair and wit absent from the theatrics of political showmanship. This is the story of how leaders and their teams get things done.

Full Review | Jul 9, 2022

A history lesson at its core, but it's cleverly buried beneath one magnificent performance and several strong supporters.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Dec 2, 2020

A good film blessed with an extraordinary and surefire Oscar caliber performance from Daniel Day-Lewis.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.0/4.0 | Sep 14, 2020

'Lincoln' is not only an avid biopic, it is a pleasant historical lesson that captures the thinking of an era where social ideas were diffused by a political party duality. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 25, 2020

In a truly epic first act, the equal of anything in the David Lean canon, Steven Spielberg and his screenwriting collaborator, playwright Tony Kushner, frame the awful dilemma Lincoln faced in what would prove to be the last four months of his life.

Full Review | Jun 19, 2020

Spielberg has put together a film that is reverent but not fawning; familiar but not clichéd; measured but not ponderous.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2020

There is a reason the eternal flame of Lincoln burns so brightly to this day. Thanks to Steven Spielberg, you can see the legacy, meet the man and "feel" the fabric of history...

Full Review | Nov 27, 2019

Lincoln returns dignity to politics.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 13, 2019

The recurrent themes that crop up again and again in the film are those of sagacity, maturity and the necessary compromises that come as part of ageing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 31, 2019

A haunting performance that is one of Lewis' finest in a career filled with towering achievements, proving yet again that he is arguably our greatest living actor.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 8, 2019

Lincoln's flaws don't keep it from succeeding on several levels: as a showcase for Daniel Day-Lewis; and as an uncomfortable and pointed reminder about the hideous racism that's an unavoidable piece of America's makeup.

Full Review | Feb 26, 2019

Lincoln works as well as it does because the Abraham Lincoln biopic chooses to focus on the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 18, 2019

A surprisingly low-key character piece -- which is all the better for it's subtlety.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 8, 2019

Lincoln is a revealing window of the backroom political deals that go into the process of the abolition of slavery and uniting of the nation, as well as Lincoln's own personal relationships with his family.

Full Review | Jan 26, 2019

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Directed by Steven Spielberg

The revealing story of the 16th US President's tumultuous final months in office. In a nation divided by war and the strong winds of change, Lincoln pursues a course of action designed to end the war, unite the country and abolish slavery. With the moral courage and fierce determination to succeed, his choices during this critical moment will change the fate of generations to come.

Daniel Day-Lewis Sally Field David Strathairn Joseph Gordon-Levitt James Spader Hal Holbrook Tommy Lee Jones John Hawkes Jackie Earle Haley Bruce McGill Tim Blake Nelson Joseph Cross Jared Harris Lee Pace Peter McRobbie Gulliver McGrath Gloria Reuben Jeremy Strong Michael Stuhlbarg Boris McGiver David Costabile Stephen Spinella Walton Goggins David Warshofsky Colman Domingo David Oyelowo Lukas Haas Dane DeHaan Carlos Thompson Show All… Bill Camp Elizabeth Marvel Byron Jennings Julie White Charmaine White Ralph D. Edlow Grainger Hines Richard Topol Walt Smith Dakin Matthews James 'Ike' Eichling Wayne Duvall Bill Raymond Michael Stanton Kennedy Ford Flannagan Robert Ayers Robert Peters John Moon Kevin Lawrence O'Donnell Jamie Horton Joe Dellinger Richard Warner Elijah Chester Dave Hager Sean Haggerty Mike Shiflett Gregory Itzin Stephen Dunn Stephen McKinley Henderson Chase Edmunds John Hutton Robert Ruffin Drew Sease John Lescault Scott Wichmann Adam Driver Jean Kennedy Smith Shirley Augustine Sarah Wylie Margaret Ann McGowan Hilary Montgomery Asa-Luke Twocrow Lancer Dean Shull Robert Wilharm Kevin Kline John Jones Paul Gowans Joseph Miller John Bellemer Mary Dunleavy Christopher Evan Welch Alan Sader Gannon McHale Ken Lambert Thomas Belgrey Ted Johnson Don Henderson Baker Raynor Scheine Armistead Wellford Michael Ruff Rich Wills Stephen Bozzo Christopher Alan Stewart Teddy Eck Todd Fletcher Charles Kinney Joseph Carlson Michael Goodwin Edward McDonald Jim Batchelder Gregory Hosaflook Joe Kerkes William Kaffenberger Larry Van Hoose C. Brandon Marshall David Russell Graham Benjamin Shirley Henry Kidd Joseph Frances Filipowski Thomas Aldridge Sidney Blackmer Jr. Billy Caldwell Glenn T. Crone Martin Dew Theodore Ewald Todd Hunter Joe Inscoe Raymond H. Johnson Gary Keener Randolph Meekins Frank Moran Charley Morgan Chad Pettit Barry Privett Leslie Rogers Marcello Rollando Keith Tyree Kevin J. Walsh Robert Wray S. Epatha Merkerson Christopher Boyer Stephen Dunford David Doersch Christopher Cartmill Robert Shepherd Lucas N. Hall

Director Director

Steven Spielberg

Producers Producers

Kathleen Kennedy Steven Spielberg

Writer Writer

Tony Kushner

Original Writer Original Writer

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Casting Casting

Avy Kaufman

Editor Editor

Michael Kahn

Cinematography Cinematography

Janusz Kamiński

Executive Producers Exec. Producers

Jonathan King Daniel Lupi Jeff Skoll Adam Somner Kristie Macosko Krieger

Production Design Production Design

Rick Carter

Art Direction Art Direction

David Crank Curt Beech Leslie McDonald

Set Decoration Set Decoration

Jim Erickson Charles Maloy

Stunts Stunts

Garrett Warren

Composer Composer

John Williams

Sound Sound

Ben Burtt Ron Judkins Andy Nelson Gary Rydstrom

Costume Design Costume Design

Joanna Johnston

Makeup Makeup

Lois Burwell

Hairstyling Hairstyling

Kay Georgiou

DreamWorks Pictures Amblin Entertainment Dune Entertainment The Kennedy/Marshall Company Participant Reliance Entertainment 20th Century Fox Touchstone Pictures

Releases by Date

08 oct 2012, 24 feb 2013, 17 jun 2013.

• Theatrical limited

09 Nov 2012

07 mar 2013, 16 nov 2012, 17 jan 2013, 18 jan 2013, 22 jan 2013, 23 jan 2013, 24 jan 2013, 25 jan 2013, 30 jan 2013, 31 jan 2013, 01 feb 2013, 07 feb 2013, 08 feb 2013, 14 feb 2013, 20 feb 2013, 21 feb 2013, 22 feb 2013, 14 mar 2013, 28 mar 2013, 05 apr 2013, 19 apr 2013, 23 may 2013, 05 jun 2013, 14 feb 2015, releases by country.

• Theatrical M

Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

• Theatrical 12
• Theatrical limited Toronto
• Premiere Shanghai International Film Festival
• Theatrical 18+
• Theatrical 11

Dominican Republic

El salvador.

• Theatrical TP
• Theatrical Κ
• Physical DVD,Blu-ray
• Theatrical 15A
• Theatrical G

Netherlands

• Physical 12 DVD, Blu ray
• TV 12 RTL 7

New Zealand

North macedonia, philippines.

• Theatrical 16
• Theatrical M/12
• Premiere Belgrade Film Festival
• Theatrical limited Belgrade

South Africa

South korea.

• Theatrical 7

Switzerland

• Theatrical 14
• Theatrical 保護級
• Theatrical 12A
• Premiere New York Film Festival
• Theatrical PG-13

United Arab Emirates

149 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by James (Schaffrillas) ★★

Yo Jess, you gotta, uh, get the fucking best doctors in the city, tell em to get to the theatre RIGHT FUCKING NOW. And if he, uhh, doesn't fuckin pull through and we gotta get a funeral going, dust off my rap costume cause it's time for a fucking L to the OG reprise

Review by Jay ★★★ 20

the truth is ive never seen anything with daniel day lewis nor seen him in real life and yall talk about him like hes a 80 year old veterern who somehow keeps coming back from the dead for an oscar and my first thoughts after seeing him at the globes? hes lowkey hot

Review by James (Schaffrillas) ★★ 7

I've seen this movie three times. I have TRIED to like it.

But goddammit this is one of the most boring films I've ever seen in my life. Daniel Day-Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones are the only things holding this movie together.

Review by DirkH ★★★★½ 20

I am a bit of a history freak. I love films that aim to illuminate and portray a period in history as accurately as they can. Lincoln is a prime example of this and while I fully understand that this film can be experienced as an overlong dull affair, to me it is a historical drama that ticks practically all boxes.

Let's get the obvious out of the way. Daniel Day Lewis's performance is stellar. The level of dedication he brings to his roles is awe-inspiring and here he does something extraordinary. He gives character and humanity to someone that only exists on paper. There is a certain collective awareness of what kind of man Lincoln was and Day Lewis…

Review by Will Menaker ★★★★½ 9

Off the top of my head this movie has: Michael Stuhlbarg, Lee Pace, Walton Goggins, David Strathairn, Bruce McGill, Adam Driver, Jeremy Strong, David Costabile, James Spader, John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, Jared Harris, Jackie Earle Haley, Peter McRobbie, the evil president from 24, Colman Domingo, Hal Holbrook, S, Epatha Merkerson...

It's like watching every great TV character actor our lifetimes come together to abolish slavery. A moving and credible rendering of American history that is also an Obama-era fantasy of "progressive" government.

Review by tyler guy ★ 4

take a shot every time you fall asleep

Review by CinemaVoid 🏴‍☠️ ★★★½ 7

I think Lincoln could have worked better as a TV series so it could be shot in front of a live audience.

Review by Matthew Christman ★★★★½

There’s an easy critique to make of Lincoln. It’s the latest in a long line of popular retellings of the Civil War that puts white men at the center of the narrative, marginalizing the very people who fought and died for the recognition of their own humanity. It’s more pernicious endorsement of the Great Man theory of history and all its attendant, authoritarian implications. It’s an easy critique because it’s essentially correct. If someone condemns Lincoln because they are too distractingly annoyed by this, I completely understand, and there’s really no arguing with that reaction.

But I think rejecting Lincoln for this reason is like hating Back to the Future because time travel is impossible. If you have any interest…

Review by Will ★★★ 1

Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t play a character, he is the character.

Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★½ 7

It's possible that I'm being too hard on this because it ends so very very badly—not just with the stupid epilogue (in which everyone watching Lincoln head out to Ford's Theater behaves as if they're already attending his funeral), but also with all the crowdpleasing hokiness that attends the House vote: Gale from Breaking Bad working a Big Dramatic Pause before finally deciding upon 'aye'; everyone from Mary Todd to Ulysses S. Grant jotting down notes like "8 votes to win" for our benefit; Thaddeus Stevens taking the Amendment home to share in bed with his black housekeeper (SHOCKING TWIST!), etc. Even prior to that nosedive, however, the film seemed to me too floridly theatrical, despite the best efforts…

Review by Nakul ★★★★

Re-watched Lincoln recently, and it holds up wonderfully. A film made by professionals all clicking in near perfect sync with each other. Tony Kushner’s script is a thing of beauty, the dialogue is engrossing, full of humanity and humor. The way Spielberg moves the camera is so smooth you don't even notice how great it is, absolutely brilliant use of lighting and effective mise en scene. He makes stuff look easy that’s just not. Spielberg may be the last master of old-school film grammar we have left, and all of the classic goodness are on display. I'm actually surprised how many people here find it boring. For a movie that is mainly dialogue-driven for most of its runtime, it goes at a perfectly patient & poetic pace. Tho, I wish the movie ended with scene of Lincoln walking down hallway on way to theatre. The scenes after that felt so contrived.

Review by ˗ˏˋ suspirliam ˊˎ˗ ★★½ 4

there’s a lot of acting going on in this movie

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Movie Interviews

We ask a historian: just how accurate is 'lincoln'.

Lincoln biographer Ronald White lauds the accuracy of Daniel Day-Lewis' depiction of the 16th president. DreamWorks hide caption

A great many families going to the movies over this Thanksgiving weekend will probably see Lincoln , Steven Spielberg's new film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and an impressive cast.

Based on a biography by Doris Kearns Goodwin, but scripted by playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner, it's been very well-reviewed, but here's a question: How true to history is it?

Ronald White, author of A. Lincoln: A Biography , tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer that if a ninth-grader were to write a school paper based on the film, she'd find that its "dramatic core" is basically on target.

Interview Highlights

On the film's overall historical correctness

"The dramatic core of this remarkable four months of trying to pass the 13th Amendment [which banned slavery] is true. Is every word true? No. Did Lincoln say, 'And to unborn generations ...'? No. But this is not a documentary. And so I think the delicate balance or blend between history and dramatic art comes off quite well."

On William Seward and the three lobbyists he employs

"I think the movie is wanting in one way to disabuse us of the sense that Lincoln is this high-minded idealist who wouldn't stoop to using the machine to get votes. And [Secretary of State] Seward — remember, he was Lincoln's chief rival for the Republican nomination for president — is a shrewd politician. He's in this with Lincoln; he's not an unwilling co-conspirator. And he's willing to do things sort of outside the box, that Lincoln perhaps can't do. I doubt that Lincoln actually met these three men, but Seward delivers the votes [on the 13th Amendment] in a variety of ways."

On the over-the-top drama of House debates in the film

"You don't hear anything in the House anymore; you only hear someone giving an address for C-SPAN. I mean, one of the wonderful parts of the movie is that all of them are there, they're listening; some of them are going to be persuaded. It suggests an earlier time of a much more active Congress."

On radical Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens, played as a hero by Tommy Lee Jones in Lincoln , but as a villain in 1942's Tennessee Johnson

"The earlier movie ... was produced before the civil rights movement, or in the Gone With the Wind movement, when yes, abolitionists were evil guys. Now, since the civil rights movement, we see them as courageous leaders advocating rights for African-Americans, and so we have a different viewpoint on Thaddeus Stevens. I think the movie gets it right here."

On Kate Maser's New York Times op-ed, which criticized the film for keeping black people quietly in the background

"I think that's a point well taken. And what the audience doesn't fully understand, in the final scene — almost the final scene — where suddenly African-Americans arrive in the balcony as the final vote is to be taken, that one of those is Charles Douglass, the son of Frederick Douglass. Charles had fought in the famous Massachusetts 54th; he will write to his father after that climactic vote: 'Oh, Father, how wonderful it is. People were cheering, they were crying tears of joy.' So that had the potential for more black agency, but it doesn't come to full fruition in the film."

On whether freeing the slaves was the prime motive of Abraham Lincoln, as the film suggests

"I think we still don't understand, sadly, although historians have been telling us this for a generation — that slavery really was a cause of the war. However, Lincoln did start the war to save the Union; he did not start the war originally to free the slaves. But that became a purpose for him when he realized that he could no longer move forward without a true understanding of liberty and union. He ran in 1864 for re-election on the slogan 'Liberty and Union,' and so it becomes the second purpose of the Civil War."

On Daniel Day-Lewis

"I was very pleased with Daniel Day-Lewis' depiction of Lincoln. He does a delicate balance between the homely Lincoln — the homespun Lincoln — and the high Lincoln of the second inaugural address. He walks like Lincoln, the way he puts his feet down one at a time. He talks like Lincoln — not the baritone voice of Disneyland, but the high tenor voice. Daniel Day-Lewis studied Lincoln intensely, and what comes out is a very accurate depiction of the spirit of the man."

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• DVD & Streaming
• Drama , War

Content Caution

In Theaters

• November 9, 2012
• Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln; Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln; David Strathairn as William Seward; Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Robert Lincoln; James Spader as W.N. Bilbo; Hal Holbrook as Preston Blair; Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens; John Hawkes as Robert Latham; Jackie Earle Haley as Alexander Stephens; Bruce McGill as Edwin Stanton; Tim Blake Nelson as Richard Schell; Joseph Cross as John Hay; Jared Harris as Ulysses S. Grant

Home Release Date

• March 26, 2013
• Steven Spielberg

Distributor

• Touchstone Pictures

Positive Elements   |   Spiritual Elements   |   Sexual & Romantic Content   |   Violent Content   |   Crude or Profane Language   |   Drug & Alcohol Content   |   Other Noteworthy Elements   | Conclusion

Movie Review

Here there be dragons.

So wrote the old cartographers on their parchment maps, sketching fantastical beasts with fins and fangs. They were fearsome and horrible, these monsters, able to swallow ships and devour cities.

Perhaps Abraham Lincoln, a voracious reader, ran across one of those maps one day—a map made when the world’s worst dangers lurked in its blank spaces. Maybe he smiled. Maybe he thought of how much better it would be were these the real monsters—so horrible and so beautiful and so far away. How preferable they’d be to the ones that stalk our streets and devour our families and consume our nation’s very soul.

The year is 1865, and Mr. Lincoln has had his fill of dragons.

One is named War—a gluttonous beast that has fed on the country for four sickening years. Hundreds of thousands have died at its feet, lost in its bloody maw. America’s forests and fields are covered in corpses. The streets are alive with the cry of mothers and children, mourning the beloved dead.

Another is called Slavery, a demon that’s torn at the country since its inception and before—mocking its hypocrisy, decrying the duplicity of its declaration that “All men are created equal” when so many live in chains.

Now, finally, Lincoln feels the time is right to slay a monster or two. The rebellious South is exhausted and ready to plead for peace. Slavery may, with a little luck, be wiped out through an act of Congress—the 13th Amendment.

But there’s a catch: End the war, and the Confederate South will insist on preserving slavery. Free the slaves, and the South will have no incentive to make peace.

“It’s either the Amendment or this Confederate peace,” William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, tells him. “You cannot have both.”

We know how this story ends. We read it in the Constitution, hear it in the ringing words of civil rights advocates, see it engraved on the tombs of soldiers and sewn to a field of blue on a flag that now boasts a full 50 stars.

Lincoln is the story of monsters, the man who slew them, and the price he paid to do so.

Positive Elements

Lincoln led the country through the bloodiest conflict in its history and, while so doing, reversed a horrific evil that had plagued it from its inception. And while Daniel Day-Lewis’ layered portrayal of the United States’ 16th president informs us that Lincoln was a more complex character than we sometimes want to believe, we also observe a host of reasons why Lincoln was so successful then and so revered now.

We first see Lincoln visiting his troops, listening patiently as soldiers recite his own Gettysburg Address. Indeed, the film makes a point of stressing Lincoln’s almost boundless patience—enduring the petty requests of constituents with a kindly smile, chuckling off his cabinet’s combustibility, absorbing the occasional sideswipe from his political friends and foes with grace, even when he has to force it. His style is not to dazzle with brilliance, but to guide and cajole; he spins yarns to illustrate his point, disarming his opponents with self-deprecating humor.

Some consider Lincoln’s patience and down-home style to be a political liability, and we hear how Lincoln can seem to dawdle on almost every decision that needs to be made. Every decision except one: the 13th Amendment, which Lincoln wants to speed through a lame-duck session of Congress in less than a month. In his rush to pass the thing, he utilizes every trick in his arsenal to get the work done. (More about those “tricks” later.)

Amazingly, as he drives toward his goal, Lincoln never loses sight of his family. He dotes on his little boy, Tad, and during the House of Representative’s critical Amendment vote, the president is not pacing in his office. He is with his son. He, with very few exceptions, does his very best to help his wife Mary, who’s been driven practically insane by their boy Willie’s death two years earlier. He encourages her to stay strong—put on a brave face for his sake and for the nation’s. He struggles with whether to let his oldest boy, Robert, join the military or keep him safe at home for Mary’s sake. (Lincoln eventually allows it, knowing Robert would be ashamed for the rest of his life if he didn’t serve.)

Lincoln shows grace, pardoning a 16-year-old soldier for an act of cowardice. He shows courage, making horrifically difficult decisions that risk alienating his friends, his supporters and even his wife.

Spiritual Elements

America during the Civil War was a deeply religious country. And everyone, it seems, tried to enlist God to their side.

“Congress must never declare equal those whom God created unequal!” thunders New York Representative Fernando Wood. Thaddeus Stevens, a powerful congressional abolitionist, retorts that such talk insults God. When an African-American servant tells Lincoln she’s sure the Amendment will pass—that God will see to it—Lincoln quips, “I wish He had chosen an instrument more wieldy than the House of Representatives.”

A worried father named Preston Blair pleads with Lincoln to open the door to peace “in the name of gentle Christ.” African-Americans raise or fold their hands in thanksgiving when the Amendment passes. We see and hear people asking for God’s blessing or guidance.

Lincoln talks about his longing to visit the Holy Land and walk in the footsteps of David and Solomon. Mary chides Abe and herself for not being necessarily fit to take such a spiritual pilgrimage, seeing as how they’re taking a buggy ride on Good Friday. Lincoln tells a humorous story about a parrot who was taught to say, “Today’s the day the world shall end, as the Scripture has foretold.” The punch line? The owner eventually shot the parrot, thus “confirming” the Scripture.

We hear hints that Mary tried to commune with Willie after he died. (In real life, Mary was fascinated by an unmoored spirituality in vogue at the time and held séances in Willie’s room.) She half-jokingly refers to herself as a soothsayer.

Sexual & Romantic Content

We see Mary in a state of partial undress, wearing her undergarments. Stevens shares a non-marital bed with his African-American housekeeper. (The vibe is that of an old married couple—companionable, not passionate.)

Violent Content

The film opens on a battle scene; people are stabbed with bayonets, beaten and pushed deep into the mud to drown. The sequence isn’t bloody, but it vividly conveys the horrors of war. Toward the end of the war, Lincoln visits a battlefield strewn with corpses. One mangled body has its torso splayed open, devoid of organs. We see a city burning.

When Lincoln visits wounded war vets, his son Robert follows orderlies pushing a cart that’s dribbling blood along the way. The conveyance stops at a huge pit filled with human limbs, and the orderlies unveil the cart’s contents—newly amputated legs and arms. They dump the contents in the pit as people begin to fill in the hole with dirt.

When Robert and his father get into an argument, Lincoln slaps him across the face.

Lincoln is shown on his deathbed, a bloodstained pillow beneath his head.

Crude or Profane Language

One f-word. Four or five s-words. Bigots hurl derogatory terms for African-Americans several times, including the n-word. We hear “b‑‑ch,” “p‑‑‑,” “h‑‑‑” and “bloody.” God’s name is combined with “d‑‑n” more than a dozen times. Jesus’ name is abused once.

Drug & Alcohol Content

Several characters are shown drinking (wine, beer and other presumably alcoholic beverages) and smoking (mostly cigars). Preston Blair’s wife instructs a servant to get him drunk during a long journey so he’ll be able to sleep. Lobbyists seem inebriated in a scene or two.

Other Noteworthy Elements

Remember those “tricks” Lincoln uses to push his Amendment through Congress? Well, politics can be a dirty business, and not even our most revered president escapes the muck here. From the beginning, Lincoln admits that the Emancipation Proclamation (enacted two years earlier) required some serious contortions to legally justify it. Amendment 13 will clear up any potential illegality … but to get it passed he has Seward hire some underhanded “lobbyists” to help garner the votes needed. These lobbyists are forbidden from using money to outright bribe anyone, but they’re free to offer jobs in exchange for “yes” votes.

When that’s not enough, Lincoln resorts to other means. He (in a roundabout way) tells one congressman that he’ll have him booted out of Congress unless he votes “yes.” He perpetually sidesteps rumors that he’s entertaining peace offers from the Confederacy—but in fact he is.

On the morning of the vote, the opposition demands the president respond to rumors that there’s a Confederate delegation in town. Lincoln says there is no delegation in Washington, D.C., “as far as I know.” It’s true, but only semantically so: He stalled the delegation outside town. When one principled adjunct refuses to deliver that message to Congress, Lincoln gently takes the missive out of his hands and gives it to a less scrupulous messenger.

Lincoln tells an off-color story involving a British bathroom and a picture of George Washington. He threatens to send Mary to the madhouse.

History has frozen Lincoln into something like the American conscience: kindly, principled, winsome, idealistic. And he was, indeed, all of those things.

But through that lens we lose sight of how politically savvy and shrewd he was. Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is indeed a dramatization, but the sorts of steps we see Lincoln take here are not fiction—not according to historians. And portions of the screenplay are based on a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Lincoln didn’t rise above the game: He played it with the best of them. And when Thaddeus Stevens, both his ally and critic, chastises him for his seeming lack of a moral compass���his willingness to compromise, his occasional obfuscations—Lincoln rebuts him, naturally, with a story. He relates how as a backwoodsmen, he learned it was sometimes necessary to deviate from true north in order to evade a swamp or gorge. If you plow straight on toward your goal regardless of obstacles that might terminate your trip forever, Lincoln asks, “What’s the use of knowing true north?”

Lincoln, then, like the country he led, was both an idealist and a pragmatist. Were his actions admirable? Appalling? Perhaps a bit of both. And just as Lincoln got his own hands muddy to pass that invaluable 13th Amendment, his onscreen character feels a bit muddy to those of us used to seeing him as a gleaming marble statue.

A postscript: Did Abraham Lincoln really spout the s-word? Did his colleagues use the f-word? This film places those foul words (and others) into the mouths of its historical characters, but James McPherson, a Lincoln biographer and consultant on the movie, says, “The profanity actually bothered me, especially Lincoln’s use of it. It struck me as completely unlikely—a modern injection into Lincoln’s rhetoric.” The Hollywood Reporter reports that McPherson says he emailed his objections to the screenwriter after reading an early draft, “but I see that that language made it in the movie anyhow.” David Barton, who has appeared as a history expert on Fox News, CNN and other outlets, furthers McPherson’s point by saying, “There are records of [Lincoln] confronting military generals if he heard about them cursing. Furthermore, the f-word used by [W.N.] Bilbo was virtually nonexistent in that day and it definitely would not have been used around Lincoln. If Lincoln had heard it, it is certain that he would instantly have delivered a severe rebuke.”

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Review: ‘Lincoln’ Is A Handsomely Shot, Immaculately Acted & Terribly Dull Historical Biopic

Drew taylor.

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Steven Spielberg directing a biopic on Abraham Lincoln , even one that concerns the President’s last four months in his second term, is a scenario that oozes with endless possibilities. This is, after all, a filmmaker who has cast his virtuosic eye on to past historical injustices like the Holocaust (“ Schindler’s List “) and the aftermath of the Munich Olympics massacre (“ Munich “), and who has always had a keen interest in the African American experience (“ The Color Purple ,” “ Amistad “). Imagine what he could do with the actual Civil War! Unfortunately, as it turns out, he does very little. “Lincoln,” for all its technical accomplishment, fine performances and intricate script work, is something of a lifeless bore. It’s in desperate need and short supply of the very Spielberg-ian dazzle that it was assumed he would bring to the project.

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“Lincoln” begins with a battle sequence, but instead of the gut-punching, no-holds-barred nature of “ Saving Private Ryan ” (or even “Munich,” which, like “Lincoln,” was penned by playwright Tony Kushner ), it feels half formed and safe. The sequence is the recounting of a battle between black Union soldiers and white Confederate troops, but it’s interrupted by a conversation between one of the soldiers and Lincoln. The soldier is complaining about being paid $3 less than white soldiers, and Lincoln is thoughtfully listening and bestowing his wisdom upon the young soldier.

As Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis is nothing short of mesmerizing, even in this brief introduction, and in a way this sequence is evocative of the film as a whole – it’s overtly chatty, with little interest in anything beyond the dynamics of two people communicating with each other. The Civil War is raging, but Spielberg and Kushner are more worried about two dudes talking.

The story then shifts to the White House, and the movie’s concerns become more adroitly mapped out – Abraham Lincoln wants the South to surrender and the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution to be passed by the House of Representatives. How those two goals intermingle and conflict is a source of drama, but mostly this film is an endless series of scenes where white men bicker inside candlelit rooms about the fate of the nation and the foolhardiness of trying to get something like this passed. On one hand, this kind of restraint is admirable, showing a mostly stripped-down Spielberg narrowing his focus and jettisoning most of his tricks. But on the other, it’s something close to deathly, oftentimes dull and plodding. “Lincoln” is less a historical epic than an extremely lengthy, Civil War-set episode of “ The West Wing .”

If there’s one thing that enlivens “Lincoln,” it’s the film’s supporting cast. Clearly, no actor would say no to a phone call from Steven Spielberg asking if they’d like to participate in an Abraham Lincoln movie, so even the smallest part is filled by either a big name movie star or a noticeable character actor, among them Lukas Haas , Hal Holbrook , Joseph Gordon-Levitt , Tommy Lee Jones (serving as the de facto emotional center for the movie), David Strathairn , Lee Pace , Jackie Earle Haley , Bruce McGill , Gregory Itzin , Jared Harris , Michael Stuhlbarg and Walton Goggins . The clear standouts, oddly enough, are a troop of morally nebulous political operatives played by Tim Blake Nelson , James Spader , and John Hawkes . They add some much-needed live wire electricity to the midsection of the movie, which is comprised mostly of montages where the three of them scramble around to secure enough votes for the amendment to pass.

Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is uncanny, giving off the sensation that this is the closest anyone alive today will ever get to seeing to the President walking around and talking to people. Day-Lewis inhabits the character fully, in his distinctive gait and posture (his back sometimes bending into a question-mark), his reedy voice (given the painstaking amount of historical research that went into the rest of the movie, it must be based in fact) and the more honest-feeling portrayal of his moral righteousness, which wasn’t as arrow-straight as most like to think it was. Lincoln, in this movie at least, was a conflicted, often tortured man, who knew what had to be done and was willing to bend certain rules and obligations to achieve his desired outcome.

If Lincoln has a foil, it’s not the Democrats who wanted to callously shoot down the Amendment, but rather his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln ( Sally Field ), a woman still mourning the loss of their young son and whose mental instability was the source of much speculation and gossip. She is the only one who can stand up to the great and powerful President and Field does so in a way that feels very real and emotionally sound. Their relationship was not a warm one; Lincoln was brittle and intermittently callous, and any romance that the two might have had seems to have seeped into the earth, like so much Union and Confederate blood. When Mary threatens Lincoln about sending their son Robert (Levitt) off to fight in the war effort, it’s the closest Lincoln comes to being genuinely scared.

But for all of its finely calibrated performances (seriously, Spader is amazing), for all of its visual splendor (longtime Spielberg cinematographer Janusz Kaminski makes sure even candles throw off fat lens flares), “Lincoln” remains remote, hermetic, bloodless and antiqued. At 150 minutes, it’s far too long, especially when the suspense-starved climax concerns the ratification of votes in a sequence so painstakingly detailed that it feels like it’s happening in real time. Spielberg even shies away, in the film’s closing moments, from explicitly depicting the assassination, which, aside from being an opportunity for actual thrills in the film, would have been a suitable emotional climax. Not only were several of the movie’s major characters involved in the assassination plot (it was a multi-pronged affair and involved other attempts on lives of the cabinet), Lincoln drove through throngs of people, enraptured in celebratory glee, following the passing of the Amendment. There’s something deeply poetic about the man making his way through a changed nation to meet his demise. But such poetry is nowhere to be found in “Lincoln.” [C]

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‘The Quiet Son’ Review: Vincent Lindon Shines In This Timely Story Of A Family Torn Apart By Tragedy – Venice Film Festival

By Damon Wise

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Pierre also clocks that Fus has fallen in with a new set of friends, an unseemly looking bunch, and he is concerned when a workmate tells him that someone who looked very much like Fus, wearing a dragon-logo jacket, was among a mob that recently attacked a left-wing rally. Pierre, once an activist but now done with “sticking up posters and all that”, covers for Fus, stating that they were both at home at the time of the incident. However, Fus, does own such a jacket and was out with his new friends after the game.

Pierre’s other son, Louis (Stefan Crepon) — the quiet one of the title — is watching things unfold with bemused detachment. Fus is in his early 20s, a metalworker by trade, but Louis, who turns 20 during the movie, is an academic and has been offered a place at the Sorbonne. As he crams for his exams, Louis brings over a friend, whose liberal views are scoffed at by the increasingly vitriolic Fus. The friend posits that the mainstream lefts parties are neglecting the proletariat, making them increasingly reluctant vote, but Fus thinks they never cared in the first place (“We’re just cannon fodder,” he says). In fact, he thinks this public apathy to down to the fact that the public is just fed up with the system. “We tried the left wing; we tried the right wing. We need another solution.”

Nevertheless, Pierre continues to have hope, taking his sons to a football game to see the local team F.C. Metz. Something has to give, however, and one day, though he has explicitly forbidden Fus from seeing his right-wing friends while living under his roof, Pierre returns home to find the boy lying — black and blue and bloodied — on the sofa, having been beaten up by a gang of antifa activists. His injuries are so severe that Fus’s football career is now effectively over; he can’t walk, feed or dress himself (“It’s so humiliating,” he laments). As he recovers Pierre is always there for him, hoping he’ll go back to his old ways, little knowing that things are about to get much worse.

Though it is based on a novel ( What You Need from the Night by Laurent Petitmangin, 2020), The Quiet Son has an immediacy that feels almost improvised. The Coulins have a subtle way with words, and their self-adapted script really drills down into what lies between the lines. The death of Pierre’s wife, mother to the two boys, is a case in point, a seismic event that, though it is integral to the trajectory of the drama, the three men never talk about. And when Fus finds himself in court, on very serious charges, Lindon powerfully leans into the performance that’s required of him, playing a father coming to terms with his son’s thoughts, consequences and actions, a stain on all their lives that will never be erased.

The ending leaves some room for redemption, but not a lot. Instead, Pierre is left facing an uncertain future (how will the “quiet” son react to his elder brother’s criminal legacy?). It makes some obvious points, but those points are still valid, and the Coulins have crafted a gripping societal drama about the quagmire that is modern politics.

Title:  The Quiet Son Festival:   Venice  (Competition) Sales agent:  Playtime Directors/screenwriters:   Delphine Coulin , Muriel Coulin Cast:  Vincent Lindon, Benjamin Voisin, Stefan Crepon Running time:  1 hr 50 mins

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