Why Speilberg's Masterpiece Doesn't Speak To Us
This film is about twelve minutes too long.
There is this epic moment where Daniel Day Lewis’s surely
Oscar®-winning President Abraham Lincoln walks slowly and
laboriously away from camera as he heads out of the White House
to join Sally Field’s surely Oscar®-nominated Mary Todd Lincoln
for a night at the Ford theatre. I have no idea why the film’s
theme music didn’t slowly begin to swell as credits rolled over
this very long walk toward the end of the film, or why Steven
Spielberg, America’s Genius Entertainer and director of this
brilliant masterpiece, didn’t have a keen enough sense to know
when the movie was over. I’m not sure what the point of the
final ten minutes of Lincoln were, but they damaged a brilliant
film. The film was not in any way about the tragic assassination
of a great U.S. president, so why go there at all?
I doubt many people who visit this site have seen Lincoln. There
is not much about the film that speaks to or even speak for
Black America. For me, this was the great disappointment of the
film. Black America was mainly a plot device in an otherwise
character-driven and feature-rich complex political tapestry
woven by an expert craftsman. In Spielberg’s film we see only
educated and extremely literate “Negroes” who not only deserved
freedom but surely deserved the vote and other civil rights as
well—a theme hammered strongly home by the great actor Tommy Lee
Jones who completely stole the film from the very first frame he
was in it. However, to be accurate to history and fair to Black
America, Spielberg owed us the truer story of the crippling
ignorance of a proud race broken by the evil of slavery.
Black Americans were, in overwhelming measure, illiterate and
painfully tribal—what we might call “country” today, intimidated
by and fearful of whites while dancing ignorant jigs around
campfires and squabbling among themselves. Spielberg chose to
give voice only to sublimely articulate blacks. A black soldier
recites Lincoln’s own Gettysburg Address back to him, having
heard it only once and without benefit of a printed copy. ER’s
luminous Gloria Reuben, one of America’s finest actors most
people have never heard of, spins straw into gold with her very
small part as Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, a mixed-race former slave
who became a successful seamstress, civic activist and close
friend of the president’s wife. This was the abject failure of
Lincoln, not suggesting these or any other displays of black
erudition in the film are untrue, but that the film made no
attempt to present the ignorant, clueless, subservient negroes
who forged the broader impression in the minds of equally
ignorant whites to whom trafficking human beings as chattel
goods seemed both right and normal. Lincoln puts its thumb on
the scale, with white ignorance on broad display while choosing
to avoid even a glimpse of the pervasive ignorance of a people
barred by law from even basic education. That lack of balance,
and the needless twelve minutes after Mr. Lincoln dons his
stovepipe hat, are the biggest blemishes of what comes close to
being a perfect film.
Blacks rushing to Lincoln in hopes of seeing The Color Purple,
Part II will be sorely disappointed. Lincoln has nothing
whatsoever to say to Black America and all but ignores Black
America. The film is not for us or about us. It is a political
drama about a cagey, folksy southern lawyer who somehow managed
to get himself elected president. Lincoln’s assassination haunts
the film, informs every lumbering, painful step of Day Lewis’
epic reconstruction. Subtextually, Day-Lewis’ amazing
performance echoes Barack Obama, a fellow Illinoisan whose own
at-times frustrating laid-back manner and political cunning has
been compared to that of the 16th president. This may have the
effect of blacks watching a different movie than whites see.
Not About Us, Not For Us:
African Americans appear briefly and mainly as props.
This scene is about six seconds long.
Emancipation For Some
The plot is never clearly laid out, so let me make an attempt
here: it is the fourth year of the U.S. Civil War. The South is
losing and the war’s end is indisputably imminent. This poses a
problem for the ambitious and progressive U.S. President who
confiscated the slaves of all U.S. rebels by executive order,
the Emancipation Proclamation, eighteen months before this film
begins. The Emancipation, you see, was a directive issued under
the president’s war powers. It did not, as we assume, free the
slaves. It freed some slaves in the rebel territories and not
all slaves in those territories, only those owned by people
actively involved in the rebellion. Those slaves were
confiscated as property of the rebels, the Emancipation having
much less to do with the dignity of human souls than with a war
strategy of defeating the rebels; crippling the southern economy
by depriving it of its main engine—its free labor force.
If some permanent solution to slavery were not voted into the
U.S. Constitution before the war’s end, those rebelling southern
dates would be readmitted to the Union, and those individual
states’ slavery laws would remain in effect. Amending the U.S.
Constitution requires a 2/3rds vote in the House of
Representatives, something Lincoln could never achieve once the
rebelling states were readmitted. Thus, he was forced to get the
13th Amendment to the Constitution passed before ending the war
and restoring those rebel states, whose Congressmen would surely
block the vote. Lincoln the film, therefore, was about how
President Lincoln persuaded a paired-down but still reluctant
Congress to pass the 13th Amendment before the end of the Civil
War made such a vote impossible.
With the war winding down, Lincoln turned to a lame duck
Congress and Democratic House members who’d lost their seats in
the recent election, buying many of them off with patronage jobs
and similar perks, while threatening or cajoling other through
his surrogates, extending the bloodiest war in U.S. history by
stalling a Confederate peace initiative and, ultimately,
misleading if not quite lying to Congress—an impeachable
offense. The film is a pristinely-crafted political drama, one
which you absolutely must pay strict attention to every frame of
to avoid becoming hopelessly lost within its onslaught of
characters and political devices.
11 Votes Down:
The drama and tension mostly evades African Americans,
whose stake in the film is more
personal.
Free At Last
The film, however, is about passing a bill, about a political process. There’s nothing
there for the human heart of African Americans other than the
broadest framework of what this bill’s place in history. While
it is interesting to me, as a political junkie, to view this
process, most Church Folk I know—clothed in rights and freedoms
millions of white soldiers died to give us and millions of our
black forerunners suffered and sacrificed to earn us—are likely
to not even sit through this movie. The process is fascinating,
the dialogue amazing, and it is one of the funniest and
alternatively tragic films ever made. But, as ambitious a
project as this is, Spielberg, for reasons only he and those who
know him could possibly explain, chose not to talk to us. In
Lincoln, blacks appear only as props and tokens, with brilliant
flourishes of wisdom and erudition. But it is an unbalanced
portrait, both then and now. I don’t know a lot of Church Folk
who, expecting Roots or Sounder, wouldn’t doze off, walk out, or
simply report how bored they were. And I really can’t fault
them.
Ironically, the film seems determined to free and enfranchise
only the class of blacks displayed in the film, while the
transparently self-serving throng of bigots are railing against
and fearful of a nation of freed Negroes who never appear
on-camera in this film: the illiterate, the ignorant, this Miss
Celie of TCP and CJ Memphis of Norman Jewison’s brilliant A
Soldier’s Story, who will be lost and clueless and dependent on
the state to survive. It seems, to me, that Mr. Spielberg has
invited only a preferred class of Negro to see this film, as our
modern-day equivalent of the latter class are unlikely to sit
through this because the film really is not speaking to them.
The drama and tension mostly evades African Americans, whose
stake in the film is more personal. Perhaps that's why Mr.
Speilberg didn't bother speaking to us. Like the blacks in this
film, we are regulated to being observers of history rather than
shapers of it. One eight-second flashback of Lincoln sitting
with Frederick Douglass would have changed all of that.
Christopher J. Priest
16 December 2012
editor@praisenet.org
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