Lincoln Review

I can see why this film got Daniel Day Lewis the Best Actor Oscar.  Nobody knows for sure what Lincoln sounded like or how he carried himself.  There's no moving visual or recorded speech that we can refer to when making a movie like this.  But Lewis makes the viewer forget that he is an actor and completely convinces us that this is what Lincoln was.  I was looking for flaws and found none.  The performance is one of the most perfect ones I have ever seen.

As for the rest of the movie, it is very solid and deserved the attention it got.  It's 2.5 hours long and I was watching it in an uncomfortable airplane seat.  Yet, it flew by and never felt tedious.  It had an outcome that we all know and still managed to create tension and even uncertainty.  Steven Spielberg did a very good job of telling the story of Lincoln's triumphs and not dwelling on the tragic end and thus making him a martyr.  Instead, it focuses on his personal battles to do what he knows is right even if it jeopardizes the relationships with people he loves.

There was really only one aspect of this film that I thought could be left out.  That was the political agenda and thinly veiled attacks on America's slow civil rights progress and the Republican Party losing its way.  There are two spots in the movie where specific dialogue points to these two things and they felt really out of place.  There's no way the people saying them could make these predictions especially in the context they were said.  It was blatant partisan politicking and it really had no place in the film.

That being said, it is still a great movie.  See it.