We saw Lincoln at the Winnersh Showcase on Wednesday this week in the screen at the top of the stairs on the far right hand side. This is their 'special' screening room with huge padded chairs and big cup holders. It's the place that they normally have one-off screenings, but every so often they splash a scheduled screening in there - hence Lincoln the other day. It would have been great, apart from whoever runs the screen room failing to turn the lights off completely and me having a light falling on my face for the whole film. The cinema should be properly dark when you're watching a film. They turned all the lights off in Django last week, so why not Lincoln this week? Put me in a bad mood right from the off that did.
The film has a very worthy concept and a suitably dreary opening. After some scenes of carnage on the battlefields of the civil war, the film starts with Abraham Lincoln - played with some charisma by Daniel Day Lewis - sitting on a wagon talking to two black Union soldiers. They're moaning about their pay and he tells them some weird anecdote. Now this might be a dramatisation of a famous / important moment in Lincoln's life, but it was a very strange way to open the film. We then move to a scene in the White House where Lincoln is talking to a middle-aged couple about some minor local dispute they're having. Lincoln then asks them for their opinions on the 13th amendment in a scene that's very flat. It's just a strange opening that doesn't have any kind of verve and had me wondering if the actual film hard started or if this was an extended Orange spoof. Basically I was getting bored. And if I'm getting bored by a film about historical politics, what must the rest of humanity be thinking?!
Thankfully the film does pick up the pace. As soon as Lincoln enlists his political henchmen to start tracking down the 20 Democratic votes he needs to pass the 13th amendment the film feels a little bit more like the West Wing - just a bit. Lincoln talks in parables far more often than Josiah Bartlet ever did (and he did a lot), most of which are delivered superbly but mostly impenetrable in meaning. It's an odd way to portray this historical figure, since it makes him into less of a real person and more of a fantasy all-knowing father figure of a president - just like Bartlet. I guess this is how Americans see their president though, which is why I suspect long lingering shots of his silhouetted beard and top hat will probably go down extremely well with audiences state-side.
After complaining in my review of Looper that Joseph Gordon Levitt needs to appear in more films that the Academy is likely to take seriously, here he is playing Lincoln's son Robert. Sadly though he is very much a bit part character, and he doesn't get anywhere near having enough to do to warrant a supporting actor nomination. The appearance of him and Lincoln's wife Mary are both oddly-handled in the script. It seems to focus on Lincoln's relationship to each of them rather briefly; too briefly to allow an audience to engage with them, but longer than should be expected if we weren't meant to care.
Overall I found Lincoln to be a strange cinema experience. The opening scenes had me checking my watch and the character development had me scratching my head, but after that the scenes in the US House of Representatives and negotiations surrounding passing of the amendment were properly riveting. I think I would have been more satisfied with a film that was an hour shorter and concentrated solely on the 13th amendment. Though with that we would have lost much of Lewis' outstanding performance in the eponymous role and probably would have ended up as a documentary. I expect that the Academy will lavish great praise on Lincoln this weekend; but for me I felt the film was a half-flat experience, punctuated with a few great moments (mostly when Tommy Lee Jones was shouting at people). By all means go and watch Lincoln, just don't expect a masterpiece. And try to go a cinema where they turn the lights off.
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