10 / 10
Official trailer
Lincoln is a political procedural about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865. Steven Spielberg directed it. Tony Kushner wrote the screenplay. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Abraham Lincoln and won his third Best Actor Oscar for the performance. Sally Field plays Mary Todd Lincoln. Tommy Lee Jones plays Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican from Pennsylvania. David Strathairn plays William Seward. James Spader plays W. N. Bilbo, one of the lobbyists Seward hires to flip votes. Hal Holbrook plays Preston Blair. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Robert Todd Lincoln.
The film is adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals and runs two hours and thirty minutes.
Lincoln is the kind of film I wish Hollywood made every year. It’s two and a half hours of votes, deals and arguments in rooms full of congressmen, and I find it more gripping than most thrillers.
Day-Lewis disappears so completely that I stop thinking about acting at all. It’s a 10, and it’s the film I’d hand to anyone who says politics can’t make good drama.
Very little of the war makes it on screen.
It shows the political machinery of ending slavery. The audience watches Lincoln, Seward, and a small group of operatives buy, threaten, and persuade enough lame-duck House Democrats to pass the Thirteenth Amendment before the war ends and slavery becomes something the South would otherwise have to ratify. It’s the rare political film that takes its politics seriously enough to show the corruption alongside the principle.
Day-Lewis
Daniel Day-Lewis’s Lincoln is the most complete performance in modern American cinema, as far as I’m concerned. The voice is a high tenor with a Kentucky accent, which matches what historical accounts of Lincoln’s speech describe.
The body language is loose and tired. The humor is dry, frequent, and tactical. What I love is that every joke and anecdote this Lincoln tells has a political purpose, including the ones that look like avoidance.
The scene where Lincoln explains Euclid’s first axiom to two telegraph operators in the middle of the night, while waiting for word about a coming vote, is my favorite scene in any film of the 2010s. Day-Lewis takes a Lincoln story historians have documented and gives it the actual rhythm of how the man spoke. A president builds a case for human equality out of elementary geometry, and I’m spellbound by every second of it.
For Writers
A character explaining their reasoning is high-risk material. It’s easy to write expository monologue and call it a speech. Lincoln’s Euclid scene works because the monologue is the character thinking out loud, in his own rhythm, about a problem that interests him. The audience learns about Lincoln by listening to him reason. The lesson is that monologue is acceptable when it reveals how a character thinks, not when it tells the audience what they need to know.
The Political Machinery
The film’s argument is that the Thirteenth Amendment passed because Lincoln and Seward were willing to do things that look bad. They bribed lame-duck congressmen with federal jobs they had no intention of giving them. They threatened resistant Democrats with political destruction. They sent James Spader’s character around the country offering deals to specific vote-flippers, and Spader is so grubby and funny that I wanted more of him. They lied to a Confederate peace commission to keep the war going long enough for the amendment to pass.
There’s no apology for any of this. It treats the operation as the price of getting the result. Tony Kushner’s script argues that the alternative wasn’t principled defeat. The alternative was that slavery would have survived in some form after the war ended. The compromise was that Lincoln did political crimes in service of a moral achievement that couldn’t have been won by clean means.
For Writers
A protagonist who has to compromise their principles to achieve their goals is more interesting than a protagonist whose principles the plot vindicates. Lincoln does political deals that would be career-ending for a modern politician. The film shows this and doesn’t pretend anything other than the outcome justified the deals. The lesson is that morally serious fiction often requires its protagonists to make morally compromised choices. If your protagonist never has to compromise, your stakes aren’t real.
Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones plays Thaddeus Stevens with the disgusted patience of a man who has argued for racial equality longer than most of his political peers have been alive. The scene where Stevens compromises his abolitionist principles on the House floor, claiming the amendment is about legal equality instead of full social equality, is the most painful scene in the film for me. I think it’s Jones at his very best.
The audience watches a man whose entire career has been built on a fuller position lie about that position to get votes for a partial victory. The reveal in the final scene that Stevens lived in a long-term relationship with his Black housekeeper, played by S. Epatha Merkerson, makes the political compromise more painful and more earned. Stevens knew exactly what he was lying about. He did it anyway.
For Writers
A character’s private life can transform the meaning of their public choices when the connection is revealed at the right moment. Stevens’s relationship with Lydia Smith is held back until the final reel. The audience understands his compromise differently once they know. The lesson is that information held back from the audience is a structural resource. Time its reveal. The placement determines how the audience reinterprets everything before it.
Craft Note
Steven Spielberg directed. Tony Kushner wrote, drawing on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln (Oscar, Best Actor). Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln. Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens. David Strathairn as William Seward. James Spader as W. N. Bilbo. Hal Holbrook as Preston Blair. Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Robert Todd Lincoln. Janusz Kamiński shot it. John Williams scored. Released November 2012. Approximately sixty-five million dollar budget. Two hundred and seventy-five million worldwide gross. Twelve Oscar nominations, two wins (Day-Lewis and Production Design).
Is Lincoln as good as people say?
10/10, and it’s an easy 10. It’s the best American political film of its decade. Day-Lewis’s performance belongs on the all-time list, Kushner’s script is dense in the best way, and Jones breaks my heart on that House floor. I can’t find a scene I’d cut. The film respects its audience enough to assume they can follow a procedural about an amendment most viewers hadn’t thought hard about since high school, and I’m grateful whenever a studio film trusts me that much. Watch it.
