Lincoln (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's 2012 biographical drama, opens not with a battle or a speech but with a political puzzle: how does a president end slavery when the courts might undo his most important act? Daniel Day-Lewis plays Abraham Lincoln in a film that asks the listener to sit inside the final four months of a man's life as he races to permanently close the door on human bondage in America. The screenplay by Tony Kushner draws primarily on Doris Kearns Goodwin's 2005 biography Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. The story zeroes in on January 1865 and Lincoln's campaign to get the Thirteenth Amendment passed by the House of Representatives before the Civil War ended and the slave states returned to Congress. The stakes are specific: Lincoln fears that his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation could be thrown out by the courts after the fighting stops. By the time the film is finished, it will have shown exactly how that amendment passed, the deals that were made to secure it, and the political cost of winning.

• 2. A Script Thirteen Years in the Making

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  Doris Kearns Goodwin planted the seed for this film in 1999, when she mentioned to Spielberg during a consultation that she was planning to write Team of Rivals. Spielberg told her on the spot that he wanted the film rights. DreamWorks Pictures finalized the deal in 2001, and John Logan signed on to write the script by the end of that year. Logan's early draft explored Lincoln's friendship with Frederick Douglass, a very different angle from the legislative drama the finished film would become. Playwright Paul Webb was then brought in to rewrite, and filming was briefly targeted for January 2006 before Spielberg shut it down over unhappiness with the script. Webb's draft, as Liam Neeson later described it, covered Lincoln's entire presidential term.

  Tony Kushner stepped in next, calling the assignment daunting in a way he described by comparing Lincoln to Shakespeare and Mozart. Kushner said Lincoln's abolitionist thinking struck him as particularly appealing to a Jewish writer, and he noted that Lincoln rarely quoted the New Testament, finding his ethical reasoning more talmudic in character. Kushner's first draft ran to five hundred pages and covered four months of Lincoln's life. By February 2009, he had narrowed the focus further to two months when Lincoln was consumed by the drive to adopt the Thirteenth Amendment. Kushner joked by late 2008 that he was on his nine hundred sixty-seven thousandth book about Abraham Lincoln.

  Liam Neeson was cast as Lincoln in January 2005, having worked with Spielberg previously on Schindler's List. He spent years studying the role before stepping away in July 2010, saying he had grown too old for the part. Neeson was 58 at the time, while Lincoln during the depicted period was 55 and 56. Neeson later told GQ that a table read produced what he called a thunderbolt moment of clarity, after which he asked Spielberg to recast him. It was Neeson himself who then mentioned Day-Lewis as a replacement.

• 3. Casting the Sixteenth President

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  Spielberg had approached Daniel Day-Lewis about the Lincoln role as early as 2003, but Day-Lewis declined, calling the idea of himself playing Lincoln preposterous. It took Neeson's departure in 2010, followed by personal appeals from both Neeson and Leonardo DiCaprio, to bring Day-Lewis around. In November 2010, it was confirmed publicly that Day-Lewis would take the part. Sally Field, who played Mary Todd Lincoln, gave a 2012 PBS interview in which she suggested that Neeson's exit was shaped in part by the death of his wife, Natasha Richardson, less than a year before he left the project.

  The supporting cast assembled around Day-Lewis is extensive and includes Tommy Lee Jones as Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, David Strathairn as Secretary of State William H. Seward, Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Robert Todd Lincoln. James Spader plays the operative William N. Bilbo, whose job is to persuade Democratic congressmen to cross the aisle. Hal Holbrook takes the role of Francis Preston Blair, the Republican founder whose deal-making creates one of the film's central political knots. The size of the named cast reflects Kushner's ambition to populate the entire Washington world Lincoln moved through.

• 4. The Political Machinery of January 1865

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  The film's central argument is that passing the Thirteenth Amendment required not just moral conviction but careful, sometimes murky political engineering. Lincoln needed Democratic votes and chose to concentrate on lame-duck Democrats who had already lost their re-election campaigns in 1864 and would feel less bound to party discipline. His agents were sent to offer those soon-to-be-unemployed congressmen federal jobs in exchange for their votes. Francis Preston Blair agreed to use his influence with conservative Republicans only on the condition that Lincoln authorize a secret peace mission to the Confederate government. Lincoln could not afford to lose Blair's support, so he reluctantly approved the mission even knowing it would anger the Radical Republicans.

  Thaddeus Stevens, played by Jones, presents a different kind of pressure. Stevens was a genuine racial-equality advocate, but at a critical moment in the House debate he agreed to moderate his public position and argue that the amendment guaranteed only legal equality, not a declaration of actual human equality. That concession was designed to hold wavering moderate votes. When rumors of Confederate peace envoys spread through the Capitol, both Democratic and conservative Republican members moved to postpone the vote. Lincoln defused the crisis with a carefully worded denial that any envoys were in Washington, which was technically true because he had instructed them to wait outside the city. The amendment passed by two votes.

  After the vote, Lincoln met with the Confederate representatives and told them slavery could not be restored. He argued that the North was united for ratification and that reconstructed southern legislatures would also vote to ratify. The peace negotiations collapsed and the war continued. The film then moves quickly: Lincoln visits the battlefield at Petersburg on April 3rd, speaks with Ulysses S. Grant, and receives word of Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9th.

• 5. Production and Score

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  Filming began on the 17th of October 2011, and wrapped on the 19th of December 2011. The crew shot in Virginia, using Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Petersburg as primary locations. The Virginia State Capitol served as both the exteriors and interiors of the United States Capitol and the White House exterior. The House of Delegates chamber inside was remodeled to stand in for the House of Representatives. Location manager Colleen Gibbons noted that Petersburg offered a one hundred eighty degree vista of historic structures that she described as very rare. Scenes set at Grover's Theatre were filmed at the Virginia Repertory Theatre's November Theatre in Richmond.

  John Williams composed the score, which was recorded by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Chorus. The soundtrack was released by Sony Classical on the 2nd of November 2012. Williams wrote one track, called With Malice Toward None, specifically for Chris Martin, who was the principal trumpeter of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the time. The one piece in the score not composed by Williams was Battle Cry of Freedom, originally written in 1862 by George Frederick Root during the Civil War. Spielberg had arranged a fifty-million-dollar budget to satisfy Paramount Pictures, which had been the initial distributor and had expressed concern that the project was too similar to Amistad, Spielberg's commercially unsuccessful 1997 film. Paramount dropped the film in February 2009, and the North American distribution rights moved to Walt Disney Studios the same month after DreamWorks signed a new deal with Disney. Fox joined as a co-production partner and took international rights, while Participant agreed to finance a twenty-five percent share.

• 6. Reception and Historical Debate

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  Lincoln premiered at the New York Film Festival on the 8th of October 2012, and opened in eleven theaters before expanding. It grossed two hundred seventy-five point three million dollars worldwide against a sixty-five-million-dollar budget. At the 85th Academy Awards, it received twelve nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won two: Best Production Design and Best Actor for Day-Lewis, his third win in that category. At the Golden Globes it received seven nominations and won Best Actor for Day-Lewis.

  Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars and wrote that the hallmark of Day-Lewis's performance was calm self-confidence, patience, and a willingness to play politics in a realistic way. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of eighty-nine percent based on two hundred eighty-eight reviews, with a critical consensus calling Day-Lewis's performance witty and dignified. A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times that the film is finally a movie about how difficult and costly it has been for the United States to recognize the full and equal humanity of black people, and called it a rough and noble democratic masterpiece. Not all critics were satisfied: Rex Reed wrote that there was too much material, too little revelation, and almost nothing of Spielberg's reliable cinematic flair, though even he did not dispute the quality of the central performance.

  Historians were more divided. Eric Foner of Columbia University, a Pulitzer Prize-winning specialist in the period, wrote a letter to The New York Times arguing that the film grossly exaggerated the possibility that slavery might have survived a Union victory in January 1865. Foner also pointed out that the Thirteenth Amendment originated not with Lincoln but with a petition campaign organized early in 1864 by the Women's National Loyal League, headed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Kate Masur of Northwestern University accused the film of oversimplifying the role of Black Americans in abolition. Allen Guelzo of Gettysburg College offered a more positive assessment, telling the World Socialist Web Site that the film was ninety percent on the mark, which given the way Hollywood usually does history is saying something.

  Legal historian Michael Vorenberg of Brown University, author of Final Freedom: The Civil War, The Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment, identified specific details in Kushner's screenplay that he said could only have come from his own book. Those details included the mechanics of securing Alexander Coffroth's vote and the documented presence of Black Americans in the congressional galleries during the final vote. Kushner responded directly by acknowledging he had read Vorenberg's book but maintained that Team of Rivals was his principal source. Harold Holzer, who served as a consultant and had written more than forty books on Lincoln, praised the film but told The Daily Beast there was no shortage of small historical bloopers. His main objection was to the opening scene, in which soldiers recite the Gettysburg Address from memory, something Holzer considered almost inconceivable given that the speech did not achieve wide national recognition until the twentieth century. Disney Educational Productions and Participant donated DVDs to more than thirty-seven thousand one hundred secondary schools in the United States after Spielberg received letters from educators who wanted to use the film in their curriculum.