Lincoln
(USA, 149 min.)
Dir. Steven Spielberg, Writ. Tony Kushner
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, David Strathairn,
Tommy Lee Jones, Hal Holbrook, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, James Spader, John Hawkes,
Tim Blake Nelson, Jared Harris, Gloria Reuben.
I bet Lincoln
would make an incredible stage play. Star Daniel Day-Lewis gives a magnetic
performance that could captivate an audience even better in close proximity. As
the great storyteller Abraham Lincoln, Day-Lewis recites one speech after
another. The screenplay by Tony Kusher, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning
play Angels in America, contains an
abundance of speeches. Lincoln is built
not on dialogue, but on monologue. Each character of the ensemble enjoys a
Shakespearean array of oration, which amounts to a great deal of talking, but
also competitive acting and inadvertent theatricality. The commanding lectures
of Lincoln have an inherent static
drive, so the film might have been more imposing—and effective—if staged in an
intimate setting instead of a sprawling, epic widescreen plain.