An honest take on ‘Lincoln’

November 16, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

The leading man’s too short, barely suggesting the height that his contemporaries said made him “tower o’er other men.” And his voice, researched and accurate as it may be, is not the Abe Lincoln that’s been inside our head for generations.

The actress they cast to play his wife is decades older than the woman she’s portraying.

Ulysses S. Grant is a sharp-dressed redhead, and like Lincoln himself is played by a Brit.

We don’t get the whole of his life and career: the hardscrabble childhood, the hard-won election, or even much of the civil war that election led to.

But Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is an elegiac turn from a filmmaker we thought was out of new tricks, a vivid, melancholy and meditative look at one of America’s most revered presidents. Daniel Day-Lewis gives us a very human flesh-and-blood Lincoln, weighed down by events but never at a loss for a funny story, rightfully lionized by history, but flawed and willing to take political shortcuts to secure his place in history.

“Lincoln,” using Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals” and other historical texts as its guide, zeroes in on the president and his quarrelsome cabinet and their race to amend the Constitution to ban slavery forevermore before the Civil War ends. They’re racing because of the potential for renewed conservative Southern interference from a new Congress, including newly reunited Confederate states. In brief but pointed sketches, Spielberg paints in the “rivals” Lincoln packed into his cabinet - the secretary of State, William Seward (David Strathairn) who longed to be president himself, but came to worship Lincoln, and the impatient, oft-embattled secretary of War, Edwin Stanton (Bruce McGill, ill-tempered and terrific). And the filmmaker captures the political wheeling, dealing, bargaining and bullying that it took to make a lame-duck Congress turn permanent the sentiments of Lincoln’s earlier Emancipation Proclamation.

“We’re whalin’, Mr. Ashby,” Lincoln tells one weak-kneed Congressman. “We’ve been chasin’ this whale a long time.”

I love the way Lincoln enters the picture - weary, seated, meeting soldiers who tell of their exploits — and atrocities — men so excited at the sight of him that they jabber, all at once, interrupting the president.

That’s a recurring motif here, people talking over Lincoln, impatient with his jokes, homilies and allegorical stores. His wife, Mary Todd (Sally Field), can point out that “No one’s as loved as much as you,” but that doesn’t mean his political contemporaries — friends and foes — feared insulting him, brushing him off or shouting him down.

Day-Lewis gets across the gentle humanity of the man, a doting dad, tolerant husband and a kind soul who was simply good, and never more good than when he kept things simple.

For all its grace notes and lightly lyrical touches, the movie ambles, meanders and wanders off on storytelling tangents. It’s a flaccid 2 1/2 hours long, which does make for a somewhat more complete portrait of the man, but which robs the movie of any sense of forward progress and urgency.

It’s still a lovely film, and thanks to the research and good-humored, stoop-shouldered interpretation of Honest Abe, the Lincoln that American schoolchildren picture in their heads from now on could now have a weedy drawl provided by an Oscar-winning Englishman, one of the finest actors who ever lived.