euclid’s first axiom
by Douglas Messerli
Tony
Kushner (screenplay, based, in part, on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals), Steven Spielberg
(director) Lincoln / 2012
Black soldiers' recitation of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to his face and Lincoln and his wife’s (Sally Field) reiteration of their son’s death and her near insanity—however necessary these are to provide us with information we need to evaluate the president and his situation. Tony Kushner, our best epic and political playwright, however, has done a remarkable job in creating a literate and basically focused script that, in turn, has encouraged the director to tamp down his often unbridled sentiments—which have tended to turn most of his works into behemoth pop cultural icons—and fully reveal his considerable filmmaking talents.
Spielberg’s and Kushner’s determination,
moreover, to concentrate their story upon the final four months of Lincoln’s
life as he attempted to end the Civil War and pass the Emancipation Act,
freeing the slaves, transforms the film from a lumbering biopic into a stunning
reenactment of American politics. That the political scene of the day was even
more entrenched and far more contentious and bawdier than it now is, makes this
film, accordingly, a timely statement that clearly demonstrates, as Doris Kearns
Goodwin had in her book, Team of Rivals,
just how brilliant a political force Lincoln was. Unlike most depictions of
Lincoln, finally, this film—while reasserting the man’s monumentality—does not
portray the president as a saint; Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is a flawed man, a gawky
giant of a being, who could be contentious, insistent, and, particularly,
moody, caught up as he was in the bloody slaughter of so many of his
countrymen. If he was a wit, so too was his humor often so homespun that it
bordered on the corny. His numerous maxims at times seem vague and
pointless. Even
he described himself, at moments, as a preacher who was too lazy to stop his
sermon. In short, this Lincoln is very much a human being, a man, although
determined to bring equality into law who was not always sure he was
comfortable with the Black culture for which he was battling. As he tells the
ex-slave, Elizabeth Keckley, a White House dressmaker and confidant of Mary,
after she questions him whether he will accept her and her people as equals, “I
don’t know you”—although tempering it with a phrase from King Lear, suggesting that since Blacks appear to be, like himself,
“bare, forked animals,” presumably he will used to them. Spielberg’s and
Kushner’s Lincoln is a man not above selling, through the film’s three comic
figures, with William N. Bilbo (James Spader) at the center, political
positions in return for votes.

Even the most morally outspoken center of the work, Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), an absolute abolitionist, whom we discover near the end of the film, sleeps with his Black housekeeper, describes Lincoln as a “dawdler” and fears Lincoln will “turn his back on emancipation.” Lincoln and his Republican supporters must draw in Stevens' “compass point” morality (as Lincoln explains, the compass always points due north but it does not tell you what chasms, swamps and other natural phenomena lie between), demanding that he argue that the amendment does not assure Blacks equality in social and voting rights, but simply assures equality before the law. The painful scene in which Stevens backs away from his belief in universal equality brought tears to my eyes in observing how righteousness has necessarily given way to political expediency. Attacked by a fellow radical abolitionist for his changes in position, the nearly destroyed Stevens can only admit that his goal is simply to get the bill passed; when asked if there was anything he might not say for that purpose, his only answer is a grim admission: “Seems not.”
The
dilemma at the heart of this remarkable drama is that, although he wants the
bill passed, Lincoln is even more impassioned to end the war. When Confederacy
leaders send a delegation to discuss peace, he—particularly given Republican
founder Francis Preston Blair’s pressures—cannot simply dismiss talking with
the rebels. If the war ends, however, there is little chance that emancipation
will be passed, and Blacks will inevitably return to their roles as slaves.
When the Democrats get wind of a possible truce, the House demands a
postponement on the very day of the vote. Playing with partial truths, Lincoln
assures the legislative body that no such delegates are in Washington. And we
recognize in this half-truth just how far Lincoln has himself come in his
determination to see emancipation happen.
Part of the reason this movie is so
excellent is its superlative actors who totally embody their roles. Daniel Day-Lewis,
in particular, not only creates a utterly believable Abraham Lincoln, but seems
to have almost transmogrified himself into the historical figure. In his long,
deep silences particularly—moments in which it seems that Lincoln has gone into
speculative hibernation—the actor is so convincing that we cannot even imagine
the President himself enacting his life better. At a moment when Lincoln is
almost ready to choose peace over freedom, to sacrifice his moral position to
the desirable social and political expediencies, his casual conversation with his
two Morse code operators changes everything. Are we fitted to our times or
simply living our time out are the issues which underlie his questions. One
man, responding that he is, by education, an engineer, triggers a memory in
Lincoln of when he first read Euclid’s axiom: “Things which are equal to the
same thing are also equal to one another.” The implications of that statement,
in the context, are suddenly immense. If people, Black and white, are both
“Bare, forked animals,” as he has told Elizabeth Keckley, then they are
axiomatically “equal to one another.” The pondering leader suddenly changes his
message: the Southern delegates are to be delayed in their voyage. The 13th Amendment
to the US Constitution passes the House of Representatives, moving on to become
national law.
As we know from history, Wilmington and
Richmond were vanquished, hundreds more soldiers died, but the War did finally
come to a close. Lincoln’s tour of the South with his son Tad is, as he himself
notes, indescribable: “I have seen nothing like it.” Lee surrenders to Grant.
We all know what happened next, but this restrained film does not show it.
Rather, the young Tad, attending an operatic production is forced to hear the
news from a slightly hysterical theater manager, who announces at this second
theater that the President has been shot. The boy clings to the edge of his
balcony booth in horror, until finally an adult pulls him away. Although writer and
director repeat yet another of Lincoln’s speeches, nothing else need be
said.
Los Angeles,
November 20, 2012
Reprinted
from Nth Position (December 2012).
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