Let’s just get this out of the way: I have no idea whether Daniel Day-Lewis or Joaquin Phoenix is going to get the Best Actor Academy Award. I simply don’t know. They’re entirely different breeds of performances. Phoenix portrayed a powerful, emotionally devastating character that does not exist. The performance was incredible because of the way he brought something to life which had not yet been seen.
But Daniel Day-Lewis WAS Abraham Lincoln. He inhabited that man in a borderline scary way. He was amazing because he brought a man back from the dead.
I can’t objectively say which one was better at this point. I have no clue who is getting the award. I just know that they were both magic on film.
This may come as a surprise, but Lincoln is not solely about Honest Abe, but rather about the passing of the 13th Amendment (the abolition of slavery), the end of the Civil War, and partially about bringing the Confederacy back into the Union’s jurisdiction.
As a result, the film is less a character piece than it is a straight-forward narrative about getting votes to pass an amendment.
Unfortunately, it’s not a very powerful story. All of the best moments come from Abe’s moments of introspection and his personal stories delivered with a calm but powerful voice.
Those moments happen very rarely, interspersed between scenes of Abe’s team of lobbyists trying to procuring votes and debates raging in the halls of Congress. None of these moments are bad, per se, but they didn’t affect me like virtually all of Lincoln’s scenes did.
That being said, every performance was incredible. Second only to Daniel Day-Lewis, Lee Pace played Congressman Fernando Wood and his oration and delivery was nothing short of spectacular in the precious few scenes he was in. Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens was also a delight, bringing a lot of comedic levity to the scenes he starred in, just as David Costabile (Gale from “Breaking Bad”) did in all of his. Joseph Gordon-Levitt was also in the film as Lincoln’s eldest son, and his development feels odd and awkward due to the simple fact that his overall screen time totals at maybe 5 minutes.
A lot of minor complaints I have stem from the fact that no character of the bunch gets as much screen time as they deserve, possibly worst case of which being James Spader’s outstanding performance as one of Lincoln’s lobbyists. Even the eponymous Lincoln feels like a minor part of the film just due to the staggering size of the film’s cast.
This is the strangest paradox of Lincoln. It’s a long film. It’s two and a half hours long and it feels like it drags, but there isn’t enough of any aspect of the film. Not enough time is spent with any character in particular, even the one the film is based off of. Characters don’t really develop, or at least their development isn’t shown.
We only see the political side of all these dealings, not the people that the amendment’s passing would affect. Something so simple as having Lincoln interact more consistently with a slave, or even a former slave, would have added an immediate emotional layer on top of the story that makes it more powerful. Admittedly, this would be a pretty lame way to do things, but I’d like to think that it’s better than nothing.
As an acting showcase, Lincoln is pretty much beyond compare. Every performance is really something to see. As a narrative, the film falls pretty flat. The movie’s not really bad in any way, but it didn’t impress me as much as I expected it to.
