One Sentence: Daniel Day Lewis is amazing.
Rated: PG-13
Release Date: 16-Nov-2012
Nudity: None
Biopics are great, little tricks. They recreate history to be entertaining, all while sort of teaching you what really happened. They at least attempt it, and add a bit of drama and dialogue to make it digestible. Lincoln isn’t a whole biopic, but more a story about how Lincoln worked to abolish slavery in the United States. A small sliver of his life, just a few months. So it’s a dramatized history lesson, and it is interesting, if a little long winded and technically not very exciting.
That is a silly statement right, the abolishment of slavery isn’t exciting? Well, if we are talking history here, and the process to get to that point, it was a bunch of white guys going to each other’s offices and making trades and job offers to get a vote. This movie is not much more than a look at this process, and when you really break it down, it is kind of boring.
Now Speilberg punches it up as much as he can, he casts Daniel Day Lewis, who is just amazing and I think if this was a full life biopic on Lincoln would have been amazing. We still get amazing speeches and acting by Lewis, backed up by Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The acting was stellar and the imagery was also amazing. It is still just all of these wonderful actors talking to each other in mostly polite ways about what they can give and get for something else.
I think this is a well made movie, and it is worth seeing, but it is long, it is slow, and it is not Speilberg’s best. I have a hard time suggesting you buy a ticket for this one. You will do fine with seeing it on HBO when it comes on. I almost wouldn’t go out of the way to see it unless you are a hard core history buff and you want to see it played out in “real life.”
