Saturday, April 13, 2013

Spielberg's Lincoln

Daniel Day-Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones turned in powerful performances as usual. The last four months of Lincoln's life provided the ingredients for a great drama that mostly respects the actual facts: enormous stakes and moral issues, a narrow margin of victory and great characters.

Tommy Lee Jones gave me a new appreciation of Thaddeus Stevens and his moral clarity and genius for invective. But we were fortunate that we had Lincoln as president, with his lovability and recognition of politics as the art of the possible, his lawyerly precision in his promises and his willingness to bend on everything but the most important thing.

We are lucky to have had the leaders we had in our greatest crises, and in this one more than any.

No comments: