Gotham Diary:
Lincoln
11 January 2013

It is, of course, not “just a movie.” That’s Steven Spielberg’s specialty: making films that always have a strong extra-cinematic, non-artistic, quasi-journalist chain running through them, as detachable (from the filmmaking point of view) as the background music. Perhaps this is why I find his films so hard to watch — they’re existentially muddled. And sometimes soiled — just thinking about Schindler’s List still embarrasses me, as though I’d been party to a ghastly prank. (And I saw it only on video!) Lincoln is inoffensive in this regard because it is about waiting, not suspense. There’s a huge difference. The movie’s suspense is nugatory: we know that the Thirteenth Amendment is going to pass. What thrills us Lincoln’s acrobatic patience. Again and again, the hero-president postpones action, not out of Elizabethan indecisiveness, but  in order to allow complications to gel, and they always do. The moniker “Cunctator” kept playing in my brain — the sobriquet of Flavius Maximus, a general in the Punic Wars whose innate slowness was a strength.

As I say, though, this is a not-just-a-movie movie about abolishing slavery. If Lincoln were merely one or two degrees more triumphal than it is, the film would be an insult to the endurance exacted from black Americans in the century and more that followed the Civil War. Only people ignorant of Reconstruction, Redemption, and Jim Crow could think for a second that, the assassination aside, Lincoln has a “happy ending.”

Lincoln’s greatness depends from his attempting to right a terrible wrong in the Constititution, which never mentions “slavery,” but countenances the weighing, for representational purposes, of three-fifths of the unfree population (“all other persons,” as the mealy-mouthed language has it). Slaves couldn’t vote — perish the thought! — but they could be counted, as fractions of themselves, for the purpose of determining the size of a state’s Congressional delegation. Without this, the Southern states would have been wholly marginal to the federal republic. The two plantation powerhouses, Virginia and South Carolina, had no intention of changing British for Yankee governors.  

Which brings me back to my regrets about the American Revolution. When I was a boy, I was jealous of Canadians and Australians, because they still had a monarch. Monarchs are great, I still believe — such fun! — when they know how to behave. (Insert: Memo to Charles re Chelsea Barracks.) As an old man, I understand that Britain was unprepared to govern the future American states — quite simply, no one in London really knew who was in charge of the colonies, and the colonies took full advantage of this confusion. Today, of course, we should say that Parliament ran the show, but that was not at all clear in the days of George III. And today, of course, the Parliament in Westminster does not govern Canada or Australia. Neither, for the matter of that, does HMQ. What works today was unimaginable in 1770.

No, what I regret about the Revolution now is the persistence of the States. At no point in history have the boundaries of the American states made the slightest demographic sense. They made no sense in 1776, and they make no sense now. They are useful to politicians and their acolytes, and that is all. They are, essentially, anti-democratic. You ask what I can possibly mean by that? This: states (and their capitals) were designed to be and remain anti-urban, anti-immigrant focuses of power. They stand for the proposition, widely shared in today’s surburbia, that the beneficiaries of American democracy ought to have been born in the country, and ought to know better than to live in the five or six genuine cities within its borders.

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Aside from that, Mrs Lincoln… There’s a jokey poster going round, covering the Best-Picture nominees, in which Lincoln is billed simply as “Daniel Day-Lewis wants an Oscar.” I say, give the man a dozen! If there was ever an actor capable of co-opting a Spielberg project, it is Day-Lewis. He is the only actor I can think of who up to the challenge of making sure that Spielberg’s not-just-a-movie project is, in spite of everything, a really great movie. There is a moment in the scene with George Yeaman (Michael Stuhlbarg) when Day-Lewis declares his ownership of the movie; having stood over the wavering congressman, he sweeps down into a chair with all the dread command of a Count Dracula. Throughout Lincoln, his eyes glow like penlights from raccooned eye-sockets. We shiver, even though we know that Lincoln is kind and good, because he looks and acts scary. Although maybe it would be more useful to say that he gives the greatest impersonation of a good lawyer ever captured on film. A man of secrets!

I feel utterly inadequate to the marvel of Sally Field’s performance — which, let it be known, is what I went to see. It is, like all her great work, charged with the determined yearning of an unembarrassed saint. To this, for Lincoln, she adds a period feminist note, by uncapping the bottled fizz of a woman whose intellectual reach has been lamed; Field never lets us forget that women will require emancipation as well. What’s transcedent about the lesson is her insistence that, just as blacks will become equal without changing the color of their skin, so she, or her figurative daughers, will become equal without abandoning the love of fine clothes or a mother’s desperate attachments. Men will have to learn to be equal to something other than men.

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At lunch, after the movie, I glanced through the new issue of Harper’s. As always, I began at the back, in the books section, and read John Crowley’s review of a new book about Madame Blavatsky. (When are we going to get a movie about her?) It took hours to get through the piece, what with eating a burger and my mind’s being stuck on Lincoln. Only when I was about to leave did I turn to the front of the magazine, where I found Thomas Frank’s choleric deprecation of Spielberg’s movie and the book upon which is based, Doris Kearns Godwin’s Team of Rivals. He has nothing good to say about anything. The recurrent best-seller he dismisses as “uninspiring to the point of boredom.” (This seems like a maladroit move, coming from someone who wonders what’s the matter with Kansas, but perhaps it’s just what one ought to expect.) Spielberg gets off lightly: he’s “that Michelangelo of the trite.” (I think he’s insidious.) What really troubles Frank is the celebration of a willingness to compromise that, in his view, is no better than a complacency with outright corruption. Lincoln is “a two-and-a-half hour étude on yet another favorite cliché: the impossibility of reform.” Insofar as reform is a high-minded business, however, its impossibility is a lot more serious than a cliché: it’s implausible. Reform inspired by morals and good sense, but ignorant of what students of human behavior have to tell us, will always come to naught. And behavioral reform is sneaky reform. (David Brooks wrote about this in today’s column.) Had I read Thomas Frank’s piece before going to see Lincoln, I don’t believe that it would have stopped me, for all my suspicion of the wiles of Steven Spielberg. It wouldn’t occur to me to assess the movie as a civics lesson. Although I have no desire to defend Lincoln against Frank’s charges, those charges seem merely petulant and juvenile.

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PS: I cried almost unintermittently through Lincoln.