Lincoln Review

Tony Kushner's screenplay turns the Thirteenth Amendment into a procedural, and the gamble works because the horse trading is far more interesting than reverence would have been. Day-Lewis pitches the voice high and reedy, which contemporaries said was accurate and which no previous screen Lincoln had the nerve to attempt, and he plays the man as a tactician who uses folksy anecdotes as a stalling weapon.

The telegraph office scene, where he circles around Euclid's first common notion while two young operators wait him out, is the best stretch in the picture. Tommy Lee Jones gets the sharpest writing as Thaddeus Stevens, and the moment he publicly softens his own position on racial equality to protect the count carries more weight than any battlefield could. James Spader's trio of vote buyers supplies the comedy the material badly needs.

Janusz Kaminski lights interiors with cold window light and lets faces sink into shadow, though the habit of blasting white glare through every pane becomes a tic. The real flaw is the ending. There is a perfect closing image in the gas lamp at Ford's Theatre, and the film sails past it into the second inaugural, where the John Williams score finally arrives to instruct you how to feel about a man it had spent two hours trusting you to read.