10 February 2013
The statue to Lincoln in London's Parliament Square. |
Another filmic contribution
to the relatively benign Lincoln myth, though hints of a less ethical, more
interesting figure keep the drama alive.
"For the first time, Seward understood the nature of
Lincoln’s political genius. He had been able to make himself absolute dictator
without ever letting anyone suspect that he was anything more than a joking
timid backwoods lawyer […]."
This is the key revelation for the wily Secretary of State
in Gore Vidal’s tragic historical novel, Lincoln. It is not the kind of revelation
that appeals to the Lincoln hagiographers, among them Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose
tepid Team of Rivals is supposedly the inspiration for this film.
Thankfully screenwriter Tony Kushner seems to have ditched
most of this inspiration, and produced a relatively subtle Lincoln portrait.
Except when it’s not at all subtle, and presents a viewer with serious flaws.
The film is mildly mistitled. It’s really about the US House
of Representatives vote on the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. A big
budget film about politicians wrangling and then voting – its existence is
pleasantly surprising in itself, before considering any flaws.
Lincoln (and Seward) are important characters in this drama,
but are shown neither as the only ones, nor necessarily vital to the vote,
though their decision to bribe congressmen to support them is obviously
important to the plot, as is Lincoln’s expressed motivation for getting the
amendment passed.
The film might have been much better had it relegated
Lincoln to a shadowy presence, important but rarely seen. This might have
permitted greater possibility for criticising the saint, along the lines of
Vidal’s novel. And I believe in any case it would have strengthened the drama.
As it is, we also get a portrait of the first imperial
President, and a curiously sidelong view of the terrible civil war over which
he presided.
Slavery is such a great evil that a modern audience is
surely surprised there should be any dramatic tension possible over its
abolition; certainly the author’s villainous democrats and Confederate leaders
are poorly sketched. So where was the resistance to abolishing it earlier? Here
Kushner cleverly suggests that Lincoln himself was the problem, which is to say
he knows his racist constituents must be brought along with him.
Though Lincoln is the main character, the show is
comprehensively stolen by the principled Thaddeus Stevens, who gets to say
unkind things about whites that are clearly true, but rarely heard in major
films. All the more amazing, then, that the President’s cautious pragmatic
approach, almost but not quite unprincipled, was the one that ended slavery.
Here, I think, is the core of the drama. Two different
approaches to governing, both converging in greatness at the end.
Unfortunately, Kushner blots both his depiction of the
central character and his dramatic tension by having him make a few highly
liberal, anti-slavery remarks, as if we needed to be told he was not really a
villainous slowcoach. This simplistic signposting swerves the film back into
Honest Abe hagiographic territory.
These clumsy moments confirm that without them, the
film-makers worried that an audience might actually regard Lincoln as a
villain, or at least divided over the evils of slavery.
[Ironically, at least one Lincolnite has suggested that at
least one of the anti-slavery speeches gives the false impression that the
great man was concerned about making history rather than living through it.]
So it is the unblotted film that I admire, with its
suggestions of how slavery lasted so long, and what this might mean for us now.
Other, lesser, aspects of the film are better done. The
chaotic conduct of the civil war, the dire effect of the presidency on Mr and
Mrs Lincoln personally, and the high camp of congressional horsetrading and
speechifying.
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