Imagining the Unimaginable

William Herndon, who was Lincoln’s law partner in Springfield, and who eventually collaborated on a biography of him, wrote as follows: “For fifty years God rolled Abraham Lincoln through his fiery furnace. He did it to try Abraham and to purify him for his purposes. This made Mr. Lincoln humble, tender, forbearing, sympathetic to suffering, kind, sensitive, tolerant; broadening, deepening and widening his whole nature; making him the noblest and loveliest character since Jesus Christ…I believe that Lincoln was God’s chosen one.”

Try making a movie with that playing in your head. Herndon’s was not an uncommon way of speaking about Lincoln—not then, not now. The emphasis on Lincoln’s goodness, his forbearance, his attributes both human and semi-divine, his “purified” character, which combined elements of the Old and New Testaments—well, how can you portray such a being as a political actor, a President, without falling into dreadful piety and sentiment, or sheer boringness? John Ford’s very fine “Young Mr. Lincoln,” from 1939, is about Lincoln’s youth; it offers an intimation of greatness—at the end, Lincoln walks “up the road a piece” to confront his future. But the mature Lincoln is almost unimaginable; he’s myth and shadow, a figure fogged by veneration, by love mixed with incomprehension.

Steven Spielberg began by hiring the best playwright in the country. According to the press notes for the film, Tony Kushner, immersing himself in the politics and language of the period, delivered a five-hundred page script, which was unfilmable except as a TV mini-series. At some point, when Kushner was in his car, Spielberg called, and said something like, “The best part of your script is the eighty pages devoted to passing the Thirteenth Amendment. Let’s make the whole movie about that.”

In other words, they did not make a bio-pic; they made a movie about a political actor at a specific time of crisis: January, 1865, when the war was coming to an end, and Lincoln wanted to push through the House of Representatives the Thirteenth Amendment, which made slavery unconstitutional. (The earlier Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln figured, was vulnerable and insufficient. See note five below to hear why.) Spielberg and Kushner placed their hero, then, in the middle of political struggle for the soul of the country. All the issues of the war, were encapsulated in that moment, but the movie, despite many moments one can only call noble, is not some elevated wheeze. On the contrary, “Lincoln”—I can’t believe I’m writing these words—is a legislative thriller. It’s an exciting, suspenseful movie about cajolery, persuasion, ideology. It’s a great movie about…counting votes. And into this framework, the filmmakers folded a portrait of an unhappy, torn-apart family, a kind of metaphor for the nation caught up in civil war.

As a second way of dispelling piety, Spielberg, Kushner, and Daniel Day-Lewis emphasized the sheer oddity of Lincoln’s physical presence. Lincoln was six feet four, an enormous height in the eighteen-sixties. Daniel Day-Lewis is a lanky six-two, now enlarged by a stove-pipe hat, an absurd columnar fixture. At times, seen from a distance, Lincoln looks like a drawn stick figure, perpendicular, black-suited, with an awkward tuft of beard rimming his jaw—the very opposite of power’s usual streamlined appearance. Julius Caesar, as much as any sleek modern commander, would die before seeming so awkward. Seen up close, Day-Lewis’s body appears composed of broad planks of wood held together by hinges at the waist, at the knee, at the neck. He’s stiff, uncomfortable, creaky. His walk (and this is accurate) is an unsteady, bent-shouldered trudge. Lincoln’s voice, famously, was high and piercing. Day-Lewis’s voice is very different, but he mastered Lincoln’s tenor without strain, and is able to work it for humor, for irony, for long bouts of story-telling, and for rare bouts of anger.

As Day-Lewis plays him, Lincoln recedes into himself; he seems to be not quite paying attention—a trick he uses to draw people out. He’s actually the world’s greatest listener. But when he emerges from his seeming pre-occupation, he rarely answers in the way the person before him wants him to answer. He tells a story, or makes a joke, or quotes “Hamlet.” He’s ruminative and indirect, vaguely mocking; he makes his point by fable and analogy, which is something his listeners are not always swift enough to understand.

When he’s direct—when he needs to be direct—he becomes overwhelmingly precise, driving, eloquent; really, almost terrifying. In two key scenes with his cabinet, arguing for the passage of the amendment, Day-Lewis raises his big hands and slaps them down hard on a table. In the first scene, Lincoln performs an elaborate explanation of the constitutional issues behind his drive for the amendment. The procession of arguments comes so rapidly, and with such consecutive power, that it’s hard to keep up with them. I’ve never heard anything so densely argued in a Hollywood movie. In the second, as the vote draws near, and Lincoln and his allies are falling two votes short, he tells them that this is the moment—the moment. They must act for all eternity. Slavery must be outlawed forever. In a rage, Day-Lewis stands up, talking of his “awesome power,” and demands that the men get him the last two votes. It’s Lincoln’s only moment of majesty in office, and it leaves you shaken. Any thought of Jesus disappears. This is an Old Testament figure, wrathful and demanding.

Words Above All

One of Spielberg’s greatest accomplishments was trusting Tony Kushner. What else did politicians have in the eighteen-sixties—so he must have reasoned—but words? Yes, they had literature, the Bible, and newspapers, but if a politician couldn’t speak on his feet, he had trouble getting very far. Kushner himself realized that nineteenth-century politics was essentially theatrical. He elevated the back-and-forth interplay of meetings and debate into eloquence, tirade, insult, rodomontade—the public barb, richly delivered, the swelling line of moral indignation. The inflation feels right: it was the great moment of moral passion in the country’s history. The literary historian Daniel Aaron once wrote a book (“The Unwritten War”) saying that the Civil War had produced very little literature of importance, but the literature of the period, surely, was spoken. In Kushner’s version, at any rate, the range of speech is almost Shakespearian.

The speech includes the rather formal diction of William Seward (David Strathairn), Lincoln’s rival for the 1860 nomination, who became his Secretary of State and intimate political partner, and who admonishes Lincoln when he thinks he’s wrong but serves, in the end, as his most effective instrument. There are the anguished scruples of the fence-sitters who hate slavery but hate equality, too; the sulfurous sarcasm of Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones, having a ball), a leading abolitionist and radical Republican (which meant something very different in those days), who singes the flab of moral weakness in the Democrats when they refuse to support the amendment. There is the tobacco-and-whiskey vernacular of Seward’s three greasy but intelligent operatives (James Spader, John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson). These three sports seem to have stepped out of a Mark Twain novel; they prove invaluable in rounding up (i.e., bribing with job offers) the morally fallible Democrats.

Lincoln meets the three adroit hacks and immediately understands them. He knows this side of politics—the poltroons, the fixers, the back-room boys. He came up through them and triumphed over them in Illinois. Part of his genius is that he is capable of going high and low, moving from eloquence to easy banter and profane jokes. He remains saturated in his boyhood reading—Shakespeare, the Bible, Euclid’s maxims—which he relies on as a base of understanding and principle; also as a way of steering through the twists and turns of a politician’s necessary manipulations. As Kushner fashions Lincoln, his love of literature is inseparable from his comprehension of how to move the nation—and also how to appeal to many kinds of men.