Lincoln

I saw the movie yesterday with my soon to be eleven-year-old and his friend, having heard that the beginning was a little violent, Janusz Kaminsky, the same cinematographer as shot Saving Private Ryan, having shot this one in similar grays (though without the blood, it turns out), that James Spader, who is great in the film, and bit more portly than when we last saw him, at one point remarks as the president, near the climax, pops in on him and his fellow Falstaffian arm-twisting operatives, in their ramshackle pre-Carville/Rove War Room: "Well I'll be fucked," he says, standing up to shake the president's hand.

But the opening battle scene is less violent than I expected given the times, and when the rhetoric of the film turns coarse, it is more often than not a coarseness as linguistically elegant as it is amusing and sharp, the best examples of which, not surprisingly, come from Tommy Lee Jones, who plays Senator Thaddeus Stevens, whose motivation to see the 13th Amendment to the Constitution passed is underscored by a scene later on, in the movie's denouement, with (to leave you wondering) a long-time cast member from "Law and Order."

Having worried the movie, with its PG-13 rating, might be too violent in its battle scenes, I was now worried that it wouldn't be violent enough, that linguistic elegance wasn't enough to overcome the lack of cool special effects and young hotties, that the children, thus, might get bored.

But they were never bored.

In fact they were more entertained by Lincoln's cleverly measured stories than many of his staff (one close to my heart, and that my son seemed to get especially well, involved Lincoln's remarking that he really ought to be more concise, yet he often found that when he got going he became lazy and couldn't stop himself); they laughed harder than most at the many mellifluous zingers. Which is to say that for two and a half hours these children of YouTube and "Gangnam Style" were entertained by a smart, surprisingly witty and trenchant movie driven almost entirely by stylized dialogue unfamiliar to their ears, around an argument that by now—let us be thankful—must seem to them preposterous.

I left the theater feeling not only exalted by the movie but by the hope that our children's sensibilities remain not entirely corrupted, this despite my soon to be eleven-year-old's remarking, as we walked out the theater, that it might have been cooler if they'd actually shown Lincoln getting shot (this, in all fairness, after he had nudged me to take off my cap, as he himself had, solemn, reverent soul that he is, when we learned of Lincoln's assassination late in the movie, in a coda that Anthony Lane, in The New Yorker, insisted was unnecessary to the otherwise tight construction of the plot, but nonetheless).

All to say, before Nick Silver tells you with diagrams and odds and various models, Lincoln will run away with this year's Best Picture Oscar, and quite a few more, come Academy Award time, not because it is so obviously the best movie of the year but because it is the kind of smart, crowd-pleasing movie the Academy hasn't had to consider in a while, and is eager to, for the sake of the public if nothing else, and it will win, big, and deservingly so.

Daniel Day-Lewis—can one say enough about this actor's gifts? Are we to once more pity Joaquin Phoenix for showing up with a brilliant performance—in The Master, this time, in Ring of Fire last—that unfortunately falls short of the best—to Philip Seymour Hoffman's last time (in Capote), Day-Lewis's this time? Or will the Academy, not wanting to drive Phoenix over the bend a second time, give Phoenix the nod?

Don't count on it. Daniel Day-Lewis inhabits Lincoln down to the shrug and understated syllable. None of which any of us, for comparison's sake, ever saw or heard in the original man; yet we get from Day-Lewis something that feels true, even as it isn't obvious, even as it surprises—the slouch, the man who doesn't take over the room with his prescence, but rather, can actually disappear into it—and is utterly contrary to any contemporary notion of greatness.

Like Lincoln, one could say.

A film with all manner of good support, by Tommy Lee Jones, James Spader, and others—including Sally Field as Lincoln's much beset wife Mary, whose connubial quarreling fit with the president I found especially moving, as it reminded me in its timbre, if not detail, of my wife and me when we get going. And also sets up the turn of heartbreak we feel at the end, if perhaps less than we should, in a coda that Lane, in his review, felt was dispensible (rather than over-keyed, in a way typical of Spielberg).

Friends of the Denver Center Theater will keep an eye open for both John Hutton (Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts) and Jamie Horton (New York Congressman Giles Stuart), the former being the more obvious on the screen.

Finally, let us not forget Tony Kushner, who wrote the great two-part play, Angels in America, before writing the screenplay for Spielberg's movie—for which he, too, will win an Academy Award.

A focused, fascinating movie destined to run away with awards come award time. One can already imagine our current president, supposedly a great admirer of Lincoln, watching it over and over in the White House Screening Room, as he and Congress finagle their way, less mellifluously, toward the Fiscal Cliff we're told is coming.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Now that the presidential election is over—having turned out pretty much exactly as I predicted it would back in January—we move on now to what Ben Bernanke sometime back referred to as "The Fiscal Cliff," an unpleasantness up ahead that is currently being offset by a scandal no one quite understands. At least they don't understand why what has ostensibly happened is the occasion for a scandal. Anyway, it's not nearly as exciting as Sandy. The Fiscal Cliff should be exciting enough, trust me, but it isn't, because hardly anyone understands just exactly what it entails.

Unlike a guy banging someone who isn't his wife. Still, it's not like he killed his wife and put her body in the freezer and then screwed the mistress, the biographer, in this case, on top the freezer, in front of security cameras he'd installed himself but, in his lust, forgot about.

Now, to me, that would be a better set up for a good scandal, especially one involving a CIA Director. Certainly better than what we have.

Let me just say at the outset that I—like many, apparently—couldn't care less who former 4-Star General and CIA Director David Petraeus is fucking—or did fuck, or even who he plans to fuck down the line once the smoke clears. For my money, he was the best military mind going at a time when our civilian leaders, many of whom ought to be up on charges for war crimes, had got us into two stunningly ill-advised conflicts. That he got us out of the stupider of two in a way that allows the delusional to imagine we actually won something in that ten-year fiasco—I'm speaking of Iraq—deserves as much praise as any general is likely to deserve. He literally wrote the book on counter-revolutionary tactics, and had our brilliant minds in Washington listened to him a little more, a little sooner, things might have gone better. Possibly. Or we could have just stayed out of the place altogether and maybe got out of Afghanistan a lot sooner ...

I know. Spilt milk. Money and lives. Get over it already.

Anyway, Petraeus is getting thrown to the dogs because he had an affair with his biographer, an affair he rather quickly admitted to, rather than, say, dragging out the situation endlessly in the way that, say, Lance Armstrong did. Perhaps it isn't the right point of view to have, but I find ambitious, cheating, win-at-all-costs, lying motherfuckers like Armstrong to be particularly risible, if for no other reason than they lie to the bitter end as though that game, too, is a contest to be won at all costs. I know all about what he did for people with cancer, the bracelets, the attention, and that was a big reason no one could touch him all these years—while his former teammates, and others, other cheaters, had their lives ruined. But the way I look at it, my son got better because of good medicine and good doctors and nurses, and possibly because he got a lot of love while he was dealing with it all, and because he was fortunate.

It didn't have anything to do with Lance Armstrong and his ego.

So fuck Lance Armstrong and the seedy culture of doping he perhaps more than anyone else helped to create and feed in cycling.

As to Petraeus, as best I can tell, he got in with a bad crowd. Tampa socialites. Some would say that when you're the most famous military officer of the century thus far, and your wife looks like the head librarian in a small town and your biographer looks like a thirty-something chick with a thong collection doing fitness videos on TV at two in morning, something is bound to happen. But I'm not that harsh. I would simply say, to paraphrase John Donne, that our military and intelligence services are the less for having a man like Petraeus gone from them.

But we're a country that has a habit of dispatching real talent for trivial sins.

Not that cheating on your wife with your biographer is trivial. But, in my estimation, it doesn't rank with killing and maiming tens of thousands in two fruitless wars.

Still, it's all how you handle your mistakes, I suppose. And a picture tells a thousand words. And I saw a picture of Petraeus and the biographer on Bloomberg this morning while I was having my oatmeal, and, well, I don't know how else to put it other than to say he looked like a guy who'd just gotten a blow job and wasn't used it and thus had that funny grin on his face, and I thought, A real weasal would have covered that up better. A first-rate lying son of a bitch would have looked a little more earnest, more professional, as they say, and less like a teen-ager after his or her first piece of ass.

The media, of course, is used to dealing with the game faces of weasals and cheats and so what are they to do with a CIA Director who just comes out and admits to something—resigns his post!—after a few emails get exposed? A brilliant general who screwed up and then, when caught, owns up to it. WTF?

It's a mystery we're likely to hear about for a few more weeks at least. As we dance around the cliff.

More on that another time.