Thoughts on new movie, Lincoln:Friday after Thanksgiving column for Telegraph

I was going to write a screed against Black Friday and the idol of consumerism. I saw Lincoln and that  all changed. I am grateful on this thanksgiving weekend that I was able to see it. As a minister, I hear people say all of the time that they gave up on movies due to their depiction of all forms of vulgarity. Yes, a few vulgar words are spoken in the picture, but Hollywood deserves that  its best be viewed and not only dismissed.  If you have any interest in history at all, please go see this wonderful movie. It may be wise to familiarize yourself with his White House advisors, so you can pick up on some nuance of their words and even their appearance..I usually find political films to be a bit off kilter, but this one takes seriously the moral wieght of the amendment and the necessity of the political machinations of acquiring and counting votes.

The movie deals with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in the last months of his term and his life. for our alton readers, i remind us that our own Lyman Trumbull wrote the draft of the Thirteenth Amendment, that abolished slavery in our country.While Trumbull is ignored, the revelation is Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. The Southern revision of history has dominated our textbooks, so he has been painted as a villain, as in Birth of a Nation.Here he is the aging, vigorous leader of the Radical Republican wing of Lincoln’s party.Throughout, we get a sense of the tightrope Lincoln walked over the Constitution, the definition of the war, public opinion, and the divisions between and within the parties in Congress.

I have read a bit of Lincoln biography, but am no Lincoln scholar. Still, Daniel Day Lewis’s performance is as if Abraham Lincoln  rises from the printed page and appears before our eyes. Appreciate so many of his decisions as an actor, how to pitch his voice, how to walk and move as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders, the use of the Irish gift of storytelling. In his portrayal and the great script, Lincoln uses stories for two reasons:to make a point as in a parable, or to relieve the gloom that threatened his very life.

Few portrayals of Lincoln, with the except of the fine made for TV production of years ago with Sam Waterston, do such a good job weaving the personal and public grief of the White House. The Lincolns lost a child i in 1850 and another favored child in the white House in 1862. Mary Todd Lincoln was undone in her grief, but Lincoln knew he had to carry on for the sake of their younger son and for that of the country. So the astounding casualty reports always brought a freshened pang of grief in his own soul too.

The care in the production is astonishing. the sound of church bells is recorded from churches standing in Washington at that time. The sound of a carriage door is taped from a Lincoln carriage in a museum.the light is dim in the offices.

This is the 50th anniversary of the movie set in the segregated South, To Kill a Mockingbird. In an attempt to portray nobility in a human being, Lincoln picks up some of the same feelings.In our section of the theater at least, people wept at the close of the movie and many applauded. President Wilson called movies history written with lightning. Surely, this movie will send people off to learn more about one of our great national figures whose life has merged into myth. This movie does our central national figure proud.