Director Steven Spielberg, whom I introduced last week at Gettysburg at ceremonies marking the 149th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s greatest speech, said he was deeply humbled to be delivering an address on that history-making spot.
Spielberg kept his remarks simple — like Lincoln before him. After seven years of work on his new film “Lincoln,” Spielberg feels almost as if the 16th president is “one of my oldest and dearest friends,” he said.
He made it clear that his own greatest contribution to history would come through images, not words; through the magical, not-always-realistic art of film, not the sometimes unbearable truth of history.
But compared to the historians and scholars in attendance, he admitted an advantage in making Lincoln eternal.
“I’m luckier than nearly all of you, in one sense,” he said. “I have Daniel Day-Lewis’ phone number in my speed dial.”
If many of us, sadly, get the bulk of our American history from television and film, Spielberg’s address book at least provides a silver lining. For Daniel Day-Lewis gives the definitive portrayal of our time, perhaps ever, of Honest Abe.
For people like me, who have spent their lives studying Abraham Lincoln, the film is chilling — as if he’s really come to life.
Day-Lewis does it by avoiding the traps most Lincoln actors fall into, the stoic, “Hall of Presidents”-esque stereotype that probably most Americans imagine.
There are no moving pictures of Lincoln, no recordings of his voice. But after his death, everyone was Lincoln’s best friend, and there are descriptions of everything from his accent to his gait.
The most important thing is the voice. Far from having a stentorian, Gregory Peck-like bass, Lincoln’s was a high, piercing tenor. Those who attended his speeches even described it as shrill and unpleasant for the first 10 minutes, until he got warmed up (or his endless stories managed to cow them into submission).
As an eyewitness said when Lincoln took the stage at New York’s Cooper Union in 1860: “There was nothing impressive or imposing about him . . . His clothes hung awkwardly on his gaunt and giant frame; his face was of a dark pallor, without the slightest tinge of color; his seamed and rugged features bore the furrows of hardship and struggle. His deep-set eyes looked sad and anxious.”
Lincoln was so unsure of his voice — and whether it would carry to the far reaches of Cooper Union — that he asked an old Illinois acquaintance to plant himself in the back row of the cavernous Great Hall and raise his hat on a cane if he couldn’t hear. He never had to do so.
“When he spoke,” noted contemporary Joseph H. Choate, “he was transformed before us. His eye kindled, his voice rang, his face shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly as by electric flash. For an hour and more he held his audience in the hollow of his hand.”
Lincoln’s accent fluctuated between rural Kentucky and Indiana; some describe him as pronouncing “chair” as “cheer,” others as “char.” These accents don’t really exist anymore in America, but we can approximate them from recordings from the early part of the 20th century. Day-Lewis decided on the “char.”
Like any good politician, Lincoln would crank that accent up or down depending on the audience. The educated lawyer could speak the King’s English, then, like Bill Clinton, signal to rural voters that he was one of them with his drawl and folksy charm.
When he would speak, witnesses say Lincoln’s gestures at first seemed disjointed from his words. He was all limbs, awkward in his movements. We all know Lincoln was tall, but it’s not always conveyed just how unusual he was for his time. He was 6-foot-4, at a time when the average height of a man was 5-foot-6; the Amar’e Stoudemire of presidents.
Lincoln joked about his feet that he “had a hard time getting blood down there.” He’s described as stomping, shambling along, so it’s both amusing and thrilling to see Day-Lewis doing the same, walking, as Lincoln was described, “where his leg comes down all at once.”
Lincoln holds such a profound place in American history that every group wishes to claim him, everyone wants to interpret them as their own. But he did not have clinical depression, he wasn’t gay and, despite that odd gait, he didn’t have Marfan syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that elongates the body.
I know this because one of the symptoms of Marfan’s is that you lose power in your hands, but Lincoln was strong and eager to show off. Anytime he saw an ax, anywhere, he’d always want to show people a “frontier trick.” He’d hold the ax by the handle, just between his thumb and forefinger and hold it straight out, parallel to the ground, perfectly still, before dropping it to the ground. It was the 19th century political equivalent of Vladimir Putin posing shirtless with a gun.
If “Lincoln” has one flaw, it’s that we don’t really get to see this folkiness. Though he does get to tell a dirty joke.
But that’s a minor quibble. Over 2 1/2 hours, Day-Lewis does show us his melancholy, his political craftiness, his oratorical powers and his passion.
It’s that passion that also provides an important corrective to the modern study of Lincoln. It’s fashionable to suggest that the president was indifferent to the injustice of slavery, that he pushed for emancipation purely for military purposes.
That’s not true. As “Lincoln” shows, he cared deeply about race and slavery, and felt the Thirteenth Amendment was absolutely necessary from a moral standpoint.
In 1865, the Civil War was drawing to a close, but Lincoln worried that if the Union won too quickly, slavery would continue. The Emancipation Proclamation had freed the slaves, but some might interpret that as a temporary measure during war, and there were no constitutional protections for African-Americans.
The negotiations took place during a lame-duck session, and the drama has many parallels to today. Instead of the fiscal cliff, they faced the racial cliff. And for anyone who thinks that politics are dirtier work today, the backroom deals Lincoln made should dispel notions of a “simpler time.” He offered judgeships, promised to undo railroad regulations in New Jersey — anything he could do to get a vote. Honest Abe was cutting corners.
“Lincoln” doesn’t approach this with lapel-gripping remove, but with foot-stomping, face-slapping and fist-pounding — just as the real Lincoln did. It’s a president that’s fighting to bend a reluctant Congress to his will, a human Lincoln that isn’t always pretty though his cause is right.
The movie ends with Lincoln enshrined with honors as a liberator and then transformed into a martyr after his assassination. But it’s good to remember that while he lived, he was hugely controversial. Even his last great speech, the second inaugural, which Spielberg has recreated with a great sweeping set piece, with Day-Lewis really shouting out the words the way Lincoln would have done to reach the vast throngs on the US Capitol Plaza — even that great speech was not universally admired at the time.
It ended, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Faced with these words, a Democratic newspaper from Chicago thought it “slip-shod” and “puerile.”
Few great people are appreciated in their time. And it’s good to remember that, no matter how right the decisions seem now, they were hard-fought then.
“I wanted — impossibly — to bring Lincoln back from his sleep of one-and-a-half centuries,” Steven Spielberg said at Gettysburg, “even if only for two-and-one-half hours, and even if only in a cinematic dream.”
And most important, just the right number on his speed dial.
Harold Holzer is one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln. His new book is “Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America,” a companion book for young readers to the Steven Spielberg film “Lincoln,” published this month by Newmarket Press for It! Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.
WHO’S THE TOP HAT?
From worst…
Kris Kristofferson
“Tad,” 1995
Half Lincoln’s size with twice the voice, this made viewers long for another duet with Barbra Streisand. The film dealt with Lincoln’s relationship with his sons. One, Willie, died in the White House of typhoid. Another, Robert, wanted to join the Union Army but his mother, Mary Todd, prevented it. His youngest, Tad, was a hellion who interrupted government meetings. Kristofferson stands stiffly in the middle of it all.
Dennis Weaver
“The Great Man’s Whiskers,” 1972
He had all the charisma of Chester, his signature character on “Gunsmoke.” The story is wonderful, about an 11-year-old upstate New York girl, Grace Bedell, who wrote to Lincoln that he would look a lot better with a beard. “All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husband’s to vote for you and then you would be President.” Of course, he grew the beard and on a campaign stop, he asked if she was in the crowd and gave her a kiss. Unfortunately, Weaver is like having Don Knotts play the president.
Richard Boone
“The Right Man,” 1960
It pains me to say this, because “Have Gun — Will Travel” was my favorite show as a kid. But Boone was too polished and stentorian to pull it off, and looked naked without famous moustache. He had a classically trained voice, which always sinks people trying to play Lincoln. But then his casting doesn’t seem so bad when you realize this history of presidential campaigns includes Edward G. Robinson as Teddy Roosevelt and Art Carney as FDR.
Jason Robards
“The Perfect Tribute,” 1991
This film portrays Lincoln as a pardoner, a man never able to pull the trigger on a punishment. Which isn’t really true; Lincoln was very tough as commander in chief. He once said, “If I listened to every mother’s appeal, they’d be no one in the army.” Jason Robards is a brilliant actor, but he’s limited by a bad script. Plenty of brilliant actors have played Lincoln and could have done more with better material.
Raymond Massey
“Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” 1940
Canadian actor Massey certainly looked the part — uncannily so — but he was burdened with a story meant not so much to summon Lincoln, but to inspire isolationist Pre-World War II America to fight fascism. Massey’s Lincoln was maddeningly reluctant to rise to the occasion — the opposite of the real man, who had an ambition that “knew no rest,” as his law partner said. Still, the movie worked out for its creators. Massey got to reprise Lincoln many times thereafter. And screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood secured a job in the government, where he more directly summoned America to war by ghostwriting FDR’s speeches.
Henry Fonda
“Young Mr. Lincoln,” 1939
Fonda played Lincoln as a homespun, unschooled, sly country lawyer tackling cases with more charm than evidence. A man is on trial for murder, which a witness says he saw “in the moonlight.” Lincoln brandishes an almanac in a Perry Mason moment, saying there was no moon that night. It’s good Fonda but bad history. In life, Lincoln was about as unschooled a lawyer as Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Hal Holbrook
“Lincoln” TV series, 1974-75
and “North and South,” 1985
Holbrook is unmistakably gifted, but he couldn’t quite force his face into any recognizable human expression beneath the plastic mask he was forced to wear in the TV series. His Lincoln was more “Planet of the Apes” than “Sandburg’s Lincoln,” though few came as close as Holbrook to Lincoln’s rare combination of humor and despondency. (In a triumph of stunt casting, Steven Spielberg put the old scene stealer into the new film as an elderly pol.)
Sam Waterston
Gore Vidal’s “Lincoln,” 1988
Full disclosure: Waterson is my friend and longtime partner in stage readings of Lincoln’s words. But I believe objectively that Waterston set a new bar with this performance: He actually did his own research, down to holding in his own hands the contents of Lincoln’s pockets the day he died, coming as close as anyone to showing a rarely glimpsed side of the 16th president — including his carefully concealed sense of intellectual superiority, which the allegedly humble old rail-splitter had in abundance.
… to first
Daniel Day-Lewis
“Lincoln,” 2012
No other Lincoln film matches this one in terms of cultural impact. If I was going to show schoolchildren one movie to teach them about the man, it would be this one.