If you think this is a movie about the Civil War, think again. One should be so lucky. It might mean a little action. Instead it’s a dialogue-intense film that will transcend you back to tenth grade history class when you fell asleep after scribbling on your notebook.
Four score, seven years ago, and two hours and twenty minutes of non-stop speeches in a theatre, Abe Lincoln (Daniel Day Lewis) portrays the walking and talking President that up until now we’ve only seen in history books. Perhaps we should have kept it that way. This President is a Republican, he’s in his second term, he’s in the middle of a war….alas is this George Bush Jr.? No, it’s Abe Lincoln, and apparently it’s back in a time where Republicans actually put the little people first. Lincoln draws his fans from the poor and the racists, and that’s how he gets his power in his second term of office, where the plot is narrowed down to his final year in office beginning in January 1865.
The North will win the Civil War, but the slaves are his big issue. Thus an entire movie about the outlaw of slavery or in other words: the 13th Amendment. And one can count about thirteen movie stars in the film. Sally Field portrays a no-doubt Oscar nominee as Mary Todd Lincoln, his demanding wife who grieves the loss of their son, Will. But there’s their son, Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who wants to be a soldier. And there’s David Strathairn, James Spader, Hal Holbrook, Tommy Lee Jones and Tim Blake Nelson as various politicians.
But director Steven Spielberg seems to have lost his hunger to direct. It seems he would prefer to educate rather than entertain. The upside to this otherwise flat film is that only someone as great as Spielberg could narrow this film down to a delicate blend of politics and potential stage play with barely any battle fields, never any big fireworks, but intense-thinkers behind dark desks in dark
rooms. But whatever message Spielberg is slamming over our heads, couldn’t he have done it and at the same time given the audience a bang for their buck? Two and a half tiaras only because Daniel Day Lewis is Lincoln