Friday, March 08, 2013

DANIEL DAY LINCOLN?


It seems that I spend over 2 ½ hours these days to watch a movie! I spent at least that much time watching Les Miserable’s, and I did it again last Sunday watching Lincoln, another masterpiece of the cinema!

The thing that amazes me is that it took an Englishman to portray one of the greatest presidents this country ever produced! Putting that last statement aside, Daniel Day Lewis did a magnificent job, he came across very convincingly.

Alexander Cartwright
The movie is directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a book written by Doris Kearns Goodwin about Abraham Lincoln, who has written with authority on Lincoln, LBJ and also about Baseball. In fact her fingerprints are apparent when one obscure fact came out, the mention in the movie of Alexander Cartwright: the modern inventor of baseball.

The movie seems somewhat dark, scene after scene depicting the gloom of war and winter, the coldness of death and harshness of life in 1865 as the Civil War is winding down and the 13th amendment is struggling to become enacted.

Sally Fields who plays Mary Todd Lincoln does a very credible job and was very convincing. Tommy Lee Jones as the gentleman from Ohio: Thaddeus Stevens, Hal Holbrook who played a pretty good Mark Twain once as Francis Preston Blair and a guy who is such a great actor he creeps up on you: James Spader as W. N. Bilbo.
Could play Daniel Day Lewis

The kid who plays Robert Todd Lincoln: Joseph Gorden-Levit seemed to fill in very nicely but created some interest in a historical context because his part along and the final scene in the movie are not accurate.  Robert Todd Lincoln in real life had a speech impediment, and although intelligent was never schooled until after Lincoln died! In the final scene Tommy Lee Jones goes home after the 13th amendment is ratified and gives the tally sheet from the House floor to his friend or housekeeper or lover, all three inferences can be made is shown as a black woman, when in fact she was a Malotto.

I enjoyed the movie and will admit that the time flew by. It could be that I love history, and it did explain in great detail the personality of Lincoln as a father as well as husband and President. The way the war was depicted also brought home the reality and horror of the conflict.


3 comments:

Jim Pantaleno said...

Great movie, great performances. Wish we could reanimate old Abe who understood the art of government unlike the petulant morons in office today, soiling by their very presence the hallowed corridors that Lincoln once walked.

timetraveler said...

Wasn't it the younger son, Tad Lincoln, who was not schooled until after his father's death? A few years later at the age of 18 he died; he became the third of Lincoln's children to perish before adulthood. Robert, the only child to live a full lifetime, was in the military at the time of the assassination.

Joseph Del Broccolo said...

You are correct timetravelor, I meant the youngest.