Havana, Wednesday April 22, 2013. Year 17 / Number 113 Lincoln Rolando Pérez Betancourt rolando.pb@granma.cip.cu A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann. Lincoln has just premiered. Spielberg’s Lincoln, though. No offense meant, but we all know that there are as many Napoleons as directors determined to approach the character, and the same goes to each and every historical figure ever brought to life on screen. For good and bad, Lincoln has been on many people’s lips. While many applaud its technical virtues, others disparage, essentially, its didactic tone –there’s certainly some of that–and a fairly slow development, which is not at all like Steven Spielberg. Tapped for 12 Oscar nominations, Lincoln was one of last year’s most highly-publicized films. As the months went by, however, its glow grew more faint. and in the end, it only got two of the statuettes: the main one, for Best Actor (indisputable) went to the British Daniel Day-Lewis for his portrayal of the 16th President of the United States, a politician who strived to keep the Union in one piece during the Civil War, abolished slavery, and is undoubtedly remembered for his honesty and fortitude. Spielberg didn’t make a traditional biopic stretching from Lincoln’s birth to his death –as David Griffith did, in a rather simplistic way, back in 1930– but a story centered on the last four months of the President’s life, a period when slavery and the Civil War came to an end that gave us an intimate depiction of the man and the politician and all eyes settled on the dramatic debate around the famous 13th Amendment, put forward by Lincoln in order to grant slaves their freedom. Politics, politicking, all kinds of maneuvering both on and behind the scenes, as each side did anything to achieve what they set out to do, with Lincoln’s Republicans wrestling to have the amendment passed before the war –which they were already winning– officially ended, and the Democratic leaders fighting tooth and nail to prevent such decision at any cost. The film is marked by a thorough reconstruction work that successfully highlights the spirit of the time, the slaves’ expectations and the burden of the war –in the background– all supported by the figure of Abraham Lincoln, respectfully addressed by a director who presented him as a skilled statesman coping with a convoluted scenario that included his family life. To a large extent, Spielberg keeps clear of the Lincoln sanctified by monuments and shows him relying, when needed, on hardly orthodox methods to win his struggle, one vote at a time. And yet, towards the end, he can’t help but turn to those particularly sweet poetic resources –such as when Lincoln emerges from the light of a candelabra– that so often defines his sentimental leanings. His movie tries to be objective, and it probably is, but he goes to extremely great lengths to cast a sympathetic light on Lincoln’s Republicans as history’s “good guys” and to present the Democrats involved in the parliamentary discussion as a gang of evil bulldozers. From this standpoint, Lincoln lacks artistic subtlety and brims in black-and-white views. Lincoln needs to make its plot and artistic achievements enjoyable, as evidenced now and then by the decision to shift the lens of the camera to what seems less important and, from there, narrate what’s truly significant. Since the movie is focused on just four months of the president’s life, many controversial issues related to his figure are left out of the plot, for instance, the great economic gap between North and South (with slavery in between), Lincoln’s social evolution over time –he did not always believe in freeing the slaves– his identification in his final years with the German Utopian socialists, and even the short-lived exchange of letters he had with Karl Marx when the latter wrote to congratulate him for what he was doing. That Lincoln would have also been quite interesting, but it’s one that Spielberg –who is neither Costa-Gavras nor Oliver Stone– would never base a movie on. |
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Lincoln
de estreno. El Lincoln de Spielberg, sin intención
peyorativa, que ya se sabe que hay tantos Napoleón como directores
empeñados en asumir el personaje, y lo mismo sucede con cuanta figura
histórica cobre vida en pantalla.
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