10 / 10
Lincoln is a political procedural about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865. Steven Spielberg directed it. Tony Kushner wrote the screenplay. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Abraham Lincoln and won his third Best Actor Oscar for the performance. Sally Field plays Mary Todd Lincoln. Tommy Lee Jones plays Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican from Pennsylvania. David Strathairn plays William Seward. James Spader plays W. N. Bilbo, one of the lobbyists Seward hires to flip votes. Hal Holbrook plays Preston Blair. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Robert Todd Lincoln. The film is adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals and runs two hours and thirty minutes.
The film does not show much of the war. It shows the political machinery of ending slavery. The audience watches Lincoln, Seward, and a small group of operatives buy, threaten, and persuade enough lame-duck House Democrats to pass the Thirteenth Amendment before the war ends and slavery becomes something the South would otherwise have to ratify. It is the rare political film that takes its politics seriously enough to show the corruption alongside the principle.
Day-Lewis
Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln is one of the most complete acting performances in modern American cinema. The voice is a high tenor with a Kentucky accent, which is what historical accounts of Lincoln’s speech describe. The body language is loose and tired. The humor is dry, frequent, and tactical. Day-Lewis plays Lincoln as a man whose every joke and anecdote has a political purpose, including the ones that look like avoidance.
The scene where Lincoln explains Euclid’s first axiom to two telegraph operators in the middle of the night, while waiting for word about a coming vote, is one of the great moments of acting in any film of the 2010s. Day-Lewis takes a Lincoln story that historians have documented and brings the actual rhythm of how the man spoke to the screen. The audience watches a president build a case for human equality from elementary geometry. The scene plays.
For Writers
A character explaining their reasoning is high-risk material. It is easy to write expository monologue and call it a speech. Lincoln’s Euclid scene works because the monologue is not exposition. It is the character thinking out loud, in his own rhythm, about a problem that genuinely interests him. The audience learns about Lincoln by listening to him reason. The lesson is that monologue is acceptable when it reveals how a character thinks, not when it tells the audience what they need to know.
The Political Machinery
The film’s argument is that the Thirteenth Amendment passed because Lincoln and Seward were willing to do things that look bad. They bribed lame-duck congressmen with federal jobs they had no intention of giving them. They threatened resistant Democrats with political destruction. They had James Spader’s character travel the country offering deals to specific congressional vote-flippers. They lied to a Confederate peace commission about the status of peace talks to keep the war going long enough for the amendment to pass.
The film does not apologize for any of this. It treats the operation as the price of getting the result. Tony Kushner’s script argues that the alternative was not principled defeat. The alternative was that slavery would have survived in some form after the war ended. The compromise was that Lincoln did political crimes in service of a moral achievement that could not have been won by clean means.
For Writers
A protagonist who has to compromise their principles to achieve their goals is more interesting than a protagonist whose principles are vindicated by the plot. Lincoln does political deals that would be career-ending for a modern politician. The film shows this. The film does not pretend the deals were justified by anything other than the outcome. The lesson is that morally serious fiction often requires its protagonists to make morally compromised choices. If your protagonist never has to compromise, your stakes are not real.
Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones plays Thaddeus Stevens with the disgusted patience of a man who has been arguing for racial equality longer than most of his political peers have been alive. The scene where Stevens has to publicly compromise his abolitionist principles on the House floor by claiming the Thirteenth Amendment is about legal equality rather than full social equality is one of the most painful scenes in the film. The audience watches a man whose entire career has been built on a fuller position lie about that position in order to get votes for a partial victory.
The reveal in the final scene that Stevens lived in a long-term relationship with his Black housekeeper, played by S. Epatha Merkerson, makes the political compromise more painful and more earned. Stevens knew exactly what he was lying about. He did it anyway.
For Writers
A character’s private life can transform the meaning of their public choices when the connection is revealed at the right moment. Stevens’s relationship with Lydia Smith is held back until the final reel. The audience understands his compromise differently once they know. The lesson is that information held back from the audience is a structural resource. Decide when it lands. The placement determines how the audience reinterprets everything before it.
Craft Note
Steven Spielberg directed. Tony Kushner wrote, drawing on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln (Oscar, Best Actor). Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln. Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens. David Strathairn as William Seward. James Spader as W. N. Bilbo. Hal Holbrook as Preston Blair. Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Robert Todd Lincoln. Janusz Kamiński shot it. John Williams scored. Released November 2012. Approximately sixty-five million dollar budget. Two hundred and seventy-five million worldwide gross. Twelve Oscar nominations, two wins (Day-Lewis and Production Design).
The Verdict
10/10. The best American political film of its decade. Day-Lewis’s performance is one for the all-time list. The script is dense in the best way. The film respects its audience enough to assume they can follow a parliamentary procedural about an amendment most viewers had not thought hard about since high school. Watch it.
FAQ
Is it accurate to the historical record?
Substantially. The political mechanics of the Thirteenth Amendment vote are accurate. Specific scenes are compressed or dramatized. The film is one of the more historically responsible Hollywood treatments of nineteenth-century American politics.
Did Lincoln really sound like that?
Yes. Contemporary accounts describe Lincoln’s voice as high-pitched and Kentucky-accented. Day-Lewis chose the voice based on historical research. Some early audiences found it surprising.
Did the bribery really happen?
Substantially. The historical record supports the broad outlines of the patronage offers used to flip Democratic votes. The specific scenes are dramatized.
Why does the film end with the assassination off-screen?
Because the film is not about the assassination. It is about the Thirteenth Amendment. Spielberg cuts away from Ford’s Theatre to a different vantage point. The choice respects the film’s focus.
Who is Tony Kushner?
American playwright best known for Angels in America. He has collaborated with Spielberg multiple times (Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story, The Fabelmans).
How does it compare to other Lincoln films?
This is the definitive screen Lincoln. Henry Fonda’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) is the best earlier version. The 2012 Lincoln stands above it.
Should I watch this?
Yes.