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.