Movie Review: Lincoln (2012)

General Thoughts

Where do I begin? This was a film that I had so many expectations for, and most of them were met. Before I get into this review, I want to say right off the bat that I think this film might be very difficult for anyone other than a history or Civil War buff to truly enjoy. Not to say that this is a dull film, because it is not, and is filled with complexity and enlivening dialogue, but as an actor once told me when it comes to Civil War films, “One bearded guy giving a speech to a bunch of bearded guys in one scene looks exactly the same to the general public as another bearded guy giving a speech to a bunch of bearded guys in the next one.” I feel that it would be unfair to use that quote to classify exactly what Lincoln is, but due to the fact that this film is entirely dialogue-driven, and lasts nearly two hours and a half, it might be a bit tough for some people to get through.

“Lincoln Watch”: New “Unite” Trailer Gives Goosebumps to Viewers

Upon asking people what their reaction was to the latest Lincoln trailer, called “Unite”, which debuted after the first presidential debate last week, I think everyone’s reaction was the same: “I got goosebumps.” Yep, same here. This may be the best trailer I have ever seen for a movie, and to be honest, it really pumped me up, with a combination of the music and the intensity of the acting. I really felt invigorated after viewing it, like I could go run a marathon or something like that. It’s definitely a different kind of trailer, starting with the opening images of Dr. Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and others, with the basic message saying that if we have a dream or belief, if we can just unite, it can be accomplished, and in the case of this film, which details the waning months of the American Civil War, that dream was the eventual end of slavery. All of these images are being shown while Abraham Lincoln speaks in the background, “Do we choose to be born, or are we fitted to the times we’re born into?”, a very fitting question coming from someone who was such a strong believer in fate.

President’s Day Special: My Personal Favorites…Good and Bad

Carved into Mount Rushmore for eternity: two slave-owners, a supporter of sterilization, and a tyrant. Have a nice day.

For the first time in my life, I am going to publicly reveal who my favorite president is, in honor of President’s Day weekend. Not once during the six years I have been teaching in various locations and settings, or in two years as a history lecturer, have I ever said who it is. The reason? Well, it is just so hard to narrow them down. I have more that I do not like than like, but I think that is the same for most people. After all, has there been a president that was ever truly honest to a fault? No. Has there ever been a president not corrupted in some way? No. Has there ever been a president that truly gave a damn about the American people, instead of his political cronies? Hell no. So, you can see why it has taken me so long to come to an answer. I have known for some time now, but just wanted to double-check and make sure. He is not perfect either, you can be sure, but you will find him to be a rather adequate choice when you look at some of the other brilliant commanders-in-chief we have had over the years.

The Importance of the John Wilkes Booth Character to the New-Look “G & G”

Towards the end of the Extended Director’s Cut of Gods and Generals, is a very sophisticated scene, where Colonel Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) and his wife Fanny (Mira Sorvino) meet the acting troupe fresh off a performance of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which world-renowned actor John Wilkes Booth plays the character of Brutus, who inserts the final sword thrust into the body of the slain tyrannical emperor. Co-actor Henry T. Harrison (Cooper Huckabee), exerts a mighty announcement upon the death of Caesar: “Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead.” The scene is in no doubt a foreshadowing, but before it can be dwelled upon, the Chamberlains have been invited by one of the characters to meet Booth and Harrison after the play, and Mrs. Chamberlain asks Booth a very simple, yet thought-provoking question. She says, “Mr. Booth, tell me, do you think of your character as the hero or villain of the play?” Booth is at a loss for words, and consults Harrison before answering, “It is for the audience to decide who is hero and who is villain. We simply play the parts allotted to us.” This quote, however trivial to the naked ear, is the driving force behind the entire film.

The reason why G & G is so brilliant is because it portrays both sides as being right, despite the negative and not-so-truthful reviews stating that the sentiment is stilted towards the Confederacy. Though they indeed get more screen-time, both they and the Union Army are given equal treatment in regards to which cause is the just one in the disastrous struggle of war. The added subplot involving John Wilkes Booth only adds to a film which prompts the audience to think. Students grow up learning that the Confederacy was evil, essentially, and Booth was a psychopathic monster who murdered our 16th president. Because our education system is not at the caliber it should be, questions go unanswered. When I am in a classroom teaching, the point of my presence is not to just give facts, it is to give reasons behind them. You can only bring up the death of a person or group of people so many times and say that it is terrible before people, namely, the young men and women of America, become bored and ask, “So what?”. If you want to spark interest, you cannot go for the what, you have to go for the why.

Why did Booth assassinate Lincoln? Did he just wake up one morning, and on a whim, decide to load his pistol, sneak into the back of Ford’s Theater, and shoot the President in the back of the head? No, it was a slow build-up of events and ideas that lead to his thinking. But no one wants to know about this; no one wants to ask why. There is an American Heritage book on the Civil War that I own from the 1960′s, and the exact words used to describe Booth are “insane assassin”. That is all; one paragraph about the killing, and Booth is given his usual demonized and vilified, and always brief, treatment. The fact of the matter is, Booth was not insane, nor was he a monster, or a murdering robot as the minuscule paragraphs of biased history textbooks portray him. He was, in fact, a man, a famous one at that, who grew heated over Lincoln’s politics and decided to do something about it. While we can all agree that killing a president is far from being right, was Booth, at one point, the most photographed man in America, acting in a moment of insanity or patriotism? That is a question we can answer on our own, after thinking about it for a while, but the portrayal in this film is the most truthful one ever shown in any setting.

Right off the bat in his first scene, Booth is seen as a superstar when he is mobbed by a group of beautiful young ladies who ask for his autograph and quote lines from Richard III, pretending to be interested in Shakespeare, but Booth can tell all they really care about are his attractive looks. Booth has plenty of sex appeal, because he was, after all, the sex symbol of his day. It is hard to fathom, with anyone for that matter, being regarded as sexy when all we have are soon-to-be 150 year old grainy black-and-white photographs.

The acting put forth by Chris Conner in the role is nothing short of exhilarating. When you think about it, Conner is not just playing Booth in this film, he is playing Kings Hamlet and Macbeth as well, because of the advanced lines of dialogue in the two soliloquies he delivers. The first, is spoken overlaid with shots of dead bodies on the Antietam battlefield, where Hamlet’s character remarks that he can see a field of “twenty-thousand men” who “go to their graves like beds; fight for a plot.” It is only by extreme irony that in real life, he was giving this performance at McVicker’s Theater in Chicago on the same date as Antietam, the deadliest day in American history, September 17, 1862. Later on in the film, we get to meet Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln, as Mary Todd is raving about Booth being in Washington City for the entire month of April, 1863. The Lincolns have heard how magnificent his plays are, and cannot wait to see his performance in Macbeth. This is an excellent scene, not just for the carriage ride where the Lincoln’s discuss Booth, but the ensuing stage scene. Before it cuts to the theater, Honest Abe says, “I hear Booth does the death scene spectacularly; very physical, wilder than his brother Edwin!” Then, in a classic instance of the tongue-in-cheek humor Lincoln was famous for, he adds, “But that is the one reproach I have of Shakespeare’s heroes.” “What reproach is that dear?” asks Mary Todd. “They all make long speeches when they are killed.”

Booth then is seen on stage, reciting the “Dagger of the Mind” soliloquy. There is a reason why this was chosen, of all parts of Macbeth to pick. It is again ironic, because it works both for historical and poetic reasons. This speech, talks about there being a threat living amongst them, and while Booth pulls out a dagger, his eyes lock with Lincoln’s, who is sitting up in a private box. The overall effect is dramatic, and haunting, with the beautiful and eerie music composed by John Frizzell building up in the background. This is enhanced when you realize that this is reported to have actually happened, and even the ensuing incident, when a stagehand comes to Booth’s dressing room after the performance and tells him that the President and First Lady enjoyed the show, and want to meet him. Rather than come up with an excuse, Booth blatantly tells the man, “You may tell that tyrant, that destroyer of civil liberties, that war monger, that I am in dispose,” before begrudgingly changing his mind to have the stagehand tell the President that he had already left for the evening.

Earlier in the film, Booth is there to give the audience a dose of reality. Well, not really him, per se, but a lady friend he is dining with after Hamlet. He calls Lincoln “mad” for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, because he believes it will incite a slave uprising, before he is reminded by the woman that the document will only free slaves in rebellious states, the same states that Lincoln had no jurisdiction over. This brief conversation is there to properly teach audiences that the famed Proclamation did not free all the slaves, as we incorrectly learned growing up. If that was the case, slave-holding Union states such as Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri might have seceded from the North, and Lincoln could not have taken that chance. Of course, critics will have something negative to say about this, but since it is actually the truth, I wonder what they will draw up this time.

No other film has ever portrayed Booth in this light, because whether or not you agree with his politics present in those certain scenes, you can tell that he is sincere, and there is no insanity present in his tone of voice; it is just his very strong opinion, which as an American citizen, he was allowed to have. It can be fully expected some people—in all likelihood, the same people who decried the film back in 2003 with overwhelmingly negative reviews—will attack the insertion of these scenes as yet another instance of pro-south propaganda, but it is far from that, because it is the truth. Had The Last Full Measure been made, it would have shown the culmination of the development of Booth’s transformation from angry actor to assassin, thus helping the audience to fully understand why he killed Abraham Lincoln. But unfortunately, the sequel to the trilogy will probably not be made, and we will just have to hope audiences can handle a man with such a diabolical persona being shown in a light that is inconvenient to them, because what do we do, as a society, when someone is a threat to the lies told in history books? We bury it from plain sight. Just as certain figures in Hollywood tried to bury Gods and Generals and see to a quick bow-out eight years ago, it will be brought up yet again as more audiences view this extended cut.

We can only hope that the brilliance of Chris Conner will not be overshadowed. We can only hope that audiences will embrace John Wilkes Booth, if only for four hours and forty minutes out of their entire lives. This film is not selling Booth the assassin, it is selling Booth the man. Sometimes, when hatred is built up against someone over the course of many generations, it is forgotten that they were human once. This movie has now given us the opportunity to absorb that, and catch a glimpse of what he really was like in the years leading up to his tragic final act in 1865.

For additional reading debunking the not-so-truthful history that we grew up learning, please read this article I wrote last year on the real meaning of the Confederate Flag.

Civil War Journal: Matthew Brady Photographs Abraham Lincoln

As part of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, there will be a new column on this blog called “Civil War Journal” which has been borrowed from a History Channel series of the early 90′s that is no longer running, though some re-runs are still broadcast early in the morning.

As part of this semester, I am taking an Art Appreciation course which will basically cover the entire history of art, from presumably the first cave paintings to contemporary artists of today. Photographs are one medium that will be covered and it got me thinking about just how important a role they played during the American Civil War, and some could even argue that the war between the states gave birth to American photography, as the up-and-coming technology finally had a purpose. Before that, shots were only taken of politicians or anyone wealthy enough to sit for a photograph. Few shots of nature sprung up, but never more so than once the fall of 1862 came around, and the Civil War was reaching the height of its destruction. Matthew Brady took some of the very first pictures in history of dead soldiers on a battlefield, when he arrived in Antietam days after both armies lost a combined total of 22,000 men in just one day (ten hours) of fighting.

As important as those shots were, I have chosen to focus on something different in this article—the next four years will provide ample opportunity to explore all aspects of the war that divided the nation. Instead, I would like to examine only two pictures taken by Matthew Brady of President Abraham Lincoln, one in 1860 and then one more in 1865. In just those five years, Lincoln underwent a transformation even worse than what modern-day presidents go through in regards to their physical features changing due to the stress.

Below is a picture taken in 1860, before Lincoln was even elected, and shortly after a debate in February of that year. This one photograph helped to sell Lincoln to the United States, because as you can see, Lincoln looks nothing like a politician. He isn’t particularly good-looking, but there’s no arrogance about him, and he seems rather homely or folksy. But along with all that stands a rather tall man who is no doubt proud of his accomplishments, and someone who is very earnest and honest looking (“Honest Abe” ring a bell?). His hand perched on a book gives away his lawyer profession, but without even speaking a word, we can tell that justice is in his eyes. Lastly, there is still some youthfulness still left in this 51-year-old.

Now comes one of the most famous pictures of Lincoln, which chances are you have seen, but maybe never really looked at closely. On its own, it really isn’t that startling, but when compare with a shot taken just five years earlier, it truly is amazing, even saddening. In the picture below, taken on April 10, 1865, just four days before his assassination and days after the Union finally triumphed over the Confederacy with Robert E. Lee surrendering at Appomattox, Brady was asked to take one more photograph of the victorious president, and despite all the rigors of the presidency have had on him, we can see a look of victory in his face hidden in the wrinkles that formed over time and the graying of his hair. Here, Lincoln is sitting, some sagging in his once strong and broad shoulders, and once again looking directly into the lens of the camera, but there is no earnest look this time, just one of peace. One could say he looks defeated, which could be true because of his health, but if you look closely, you can see a little smile in his mouth, and it is almost as if he knows that his time is up. He looks at the camera as if to say, “I have done my job. It is time for me to go.” Lincoln had ended slavery, and even though he did not set out to do that when the war began, it clearly became prioritized and one of the goals of his presidency. He had saved the Union and ended the scourge of bondage, and now it was time for him to leave this earth.

One could argue that John Wilkes Booth did not assassinate Lincoln, he simply put him out of his misery. Having to deal with the death of two young children, and his wife, Mary Todd, who was never stable mentally after that, took quite a toll on him. That and the fact that he constantly waited for any bit of news about the war, sometimes waiting at the telegraph office all night to hear casualty reports of battle. As I have said earlier, I never was a fan of his politics as president, but as a man, there may not be a more fascinating American than Abraham Lincoln, and these two pictures are just a small part of the legacy he has left us.

As a side note, if you haven’t seen the Geico “Honest Abe” Lincoln commercial, click here to check it out, it is rather well done.

Spielberg to Cast Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln in Upcoming Film

I had been keeping tabs on this film project for the past few years, a project that has since disappeared from the “announced” and “in pre-production” stages on IMDB, even with director Steven Spielberg’s recent announcement that Daniel Day-Lewis would portray Abraham Lincoln in a biopic about our sixteenth president, based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals. At one time it was rumored that Liam Neeson was to play Lincoln, and even though Neeson is one of my favorite actors, Day-Lewis will no doubt play a better role, as very few actors get so into their character as he does.

The next five years have the potential to be very exciting for the film industry as we will most likely see a boost in Civil War and related movies due to the event’s 150th anniversary, which will be commemorated from 2011-2015. There is already rumor of a six-hour director’s cut for Gods and Generals to be released, and that is sure to be the first of many with such a theme.

As a Civil War buff, I do not agree with Lincoln’s politics at all. Personally, I believe some of his decisions were borderline tyrannical, such as suspending Habeas Corpus and sending the army to the houses of certain Maryland delegates to ensure the state would not vote to secede with the Union. He also could have taken different routes to see that a war did not break out, a war costing America over 600,000 lives. Nevertheless, I believe Lincoln and his presidency are fascinating, and I have always admired him as a husband and father; a man who lost two children at such a young age, and someone who had to deal with Mary Todd, who was on the brink of insanity during her stay in the White House.

Knowing Spielberg and his direction, I have no doubt that this film will be an epic, I just hope that it concentrates more on Lincoln’s time during the Civil War, and less on his life prior, as it is not as exciting or important.

Henriksen as Lincoln.

Many actors have portrayed Lincoln in the past, including my favorite depiction which was Lance Henriksen in The Day Lincoln was Shot. This film was made for TNT (which has produced a slew of Civil War movies) and starred Rob Morrow as well, who played John Wilkes Booth. The film was fantastic, showing the final 24 hours of Lincoln’s life, leading up to his assassination and the capture of Booth. The movie is worthy of a DVD release, but we have yet to see one, and the VHS copy I had of it when I taped it off of TV in 1998 has long since been lost.

The most famous portrayal of Lincoln may belong to Sam Waterston, who played the titular role in Gore Vidal’s Lincoln. This movie was alright, but I have to agree with my history professor’s summation, when he said that Vidal paints Lincoln out to be Jesus Christ. I also felt the film ended much too abruptly after the assassination, especially after being built up so much throughout. Gregory Peck also played Lincoln in a small appearance in the 1982 miniseries, The Blue and the Gray. Though I have not seen it in years, his character still stands out to me, as Peck was one of the greatest actors in the history of film.

We will now anxiously await more details of this upcoming film, such as the storyline and supporting actors, and I can only hope more films with similar themes will spring up, prompting more awareness of the most important event in our nation’s history.