Music and a Movie

[blessed_oak]

Lovely to have been drinking a cup of decaf, doing some of my favorite puzzles, breathing the scent of a "hot buttered rum" flavored candle, and listening to my new Donny Iris Christmas CD on the headphones.  I "should have" been "getting ready for Thanksgiving", but really, nobody cares if my house is a little cluttered.  And the CD was good.  In

Comments

[sukhavati]

I have seen "Lincoln." It was really well done. Obviously, everyone knows how it's supposed to end, so in theory, there's very little suspense, but I found it riveting. James Spader played one of a trio of proto-lobbyists, and the three guys were profanely hilarious, especially in some of the vignettes of the methods they tried using to persuade lame-duck congressmen to ratify the 13th Amendment. There are some glimpses of the brutality involved in the Civil War, especially the opening scene depicting hand to hand combat in a mud hole, and another scene when Lincoln rode through a battlefield in the aftermath of fighting, with the mangled corpses all about.

Daniel Day-Lewis is just superb. He absolutely makes you believe that you are watching Lincoln himself, not some actor playing at someone's idea of a legend. The voice, the walk, the way he wraps himself in shawls. There are some shots with the camera angle and lighting just so that you believe it's Lincoln himself, it's just so uncanny. Lewis absolutely committed to this role the way he has to others in the past, and he'll probably be nominated for another Oscar. Poor Sally Field has the thankless task of portraying Mary Lincoln, with her fits of temper and self pity. Again, absolute commitment to the character, but a much less sympathetic role. In watching their interaction, you wonder if the marriage would have lasted, had Lincoln not been assassinated. The two young actors playing the surviving Lincoln sons were both excellent, as were the actors playing the free blacks in the Lincoln's employ. However, I have to say that Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddius Stevens, the radical abolitionist, steals nearly every scene he's in. The man's humor can be vulgar and spiteful, always hitting it's target, but you understand the commitment he has to the cause. The last scene Jones is in is one of the most moving of the film, making his passion for abolishing slavery make sense and making him seem quite prescient and human in the process.

It's a really long movie, and Spielberg being Spielberg has a couple of moments where he's just stretching out the obvious, but it's so well done via Tony Kushner's (Angels in America) script and the acting of the principal cast. Some critic described it as a procedural on passing the amendment, and that is true to some extent, but for me it humanizes Lincoln, after so many school books and previous biopics have essentially lionized him as Saint Abraham. You see what a cunning politician he was, and how he was willing to stretch executive powers to the limit in order to create a more just society. It really made me wish that I'd lived in that time and actually known him.

As an aside, my husband had made friends with the former commandant of the old Marine Corps El Toro Air Station, a gentleman who had been a fighter pilot in WWII. We went to lunch with him and his wife at the Hotel Del Coronado, a lovely experience, which turned surreal when Mrs. Brigadier General told us how her grandfather had told her that he had voted AGAINST Lincoln in the 1864 election, and was very proud of that fact. I couldn't get over the idea that I was talking to someone who had known someone who had the gall to vote against Lincoln. It was a very weird moment, altogether fitting in the 1888 dining room where it was said that Wallace Simpson was first introduced to the Prince of Wales in the 1920s. Having said that, you realize that the last surviving Civil War soldier died a few months before you and I were born...