Out Upon the World’s Stage: Lincoln as History and Tragedy | Features

Spielberg, like Shakespeare, is an entertainer of the first class. He has managed, throughout his career, to transcend the divisions between highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow. Like Shakespeare, the director realizes that grand themes are often best conveyed through crowd-pleasing storytelling, and that amusements are best delivered when they come baked in with a certain profundity. Though many nowadays see Shakespeare as the exemplar of high art, it should not be forgotten that his tragedies played not just to monarchs and courtiers but to the groundlings on the floor, who wanted immediate entertainment alongside the lofty ambition. “Lincoln” takes a page from that playbook. Not only are there heated political exchanges and high-minded monologues, but there is slapstick, race-against-the-clock thrills, and even some blue language from old Honest Abe himself. When Spielberg told a similar story of slavery and the Constitution in “Amistad” 15 years earlier, he neglected to make the story too entertaining. In that film, the nobility was there, but nothing common; we had kings but no clowns. In “Lincoln” he rectifies that, and, in doing so, makes a film that is not only more entertaining than the earlier movie but has more to say about the human condition.

And what better subject was there for this approach than Abraham Lincoln? The man who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address was also famously a teller of tall tales and bawdy jokes. He could—as he does in the film—quote Shakespeare, Euclid, and the Bible, but he could also charm with a pithy saying or a colorful anecdote. Kushner’s screenplay captures that specific quality in not only Lincoln’s language, but the whole period’s. David Milch, the creator of TV’s modern Wild West classic “Deadwood,” once noted that Americans of the 19^th century may not have been as ‘literate’ as modern audiences, but almost all of them knew the King James Bible by heart, and had some familiarity with the Collected Works of William Shakespeare. To the surprise of some, the old-fashioned language of the film did not alienate audiences but appealed to them—Kushner had a great deal of faith in moviegoers, faith that they could listen to Lincoln talk about “pettifogging Tammany Hall hucksters” or Thaddeus Stevens complain about finding “the mephitic fumes” of a rival’s oratory to be “a lethal challenge to our pleural capacities,” without fully checking out. Like any good director of Shakespeare, Spielberg knows that audience members don’t have to catch every reference or immediately register every meaning of every word if they are hooked into the rhythms of the speech, and that if they buy the setting the director has created, they will accept, and even embrace, the most arcane and archaic of dialogue.

If the inspiration of Shakespearean tragedy and history gave “Lincoln” both its endearing mix of characters, its diversity of tone, and its rich dialogue, it also gave it one of its most divisive aspects: its ending. A common complaint about the film is that it goes on too long—for some, it should have ended after the Thirteenth Amendment passes through Congress; for others, the better stopping point would be the bittersweet shot of Lincoln’s silhouette quietly moving along a White House corridor on its way to Ford’s Theatre. These objections are well-founded, but also miss some of Spielberg and Kushner’s intentions. Lincoln silently walking to his unknowing doom would be an understated and effective ending, to be sure, but there would be something too modern about it, something slightly out-of-step to the rest of the film. In the structure that Spielberg and Kushner have created, it is necessary that we follow Lincoln to the climax of his life’s work. His death, a brutal murder in front of an audience of theatre-goers, punctuated, as history records, by the shouts of an actor perversely attempting to recall Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, has to be acknowledged explicitly by the film. It is the natural and organic conclusion of the story, and although the film pulls back somewhat on this point by not actually depicting the act of murder onscreen, it comes as close to evoking this moment as possible without directly showing it. Lincoln’s preteen son Tad sits in rapt attention, watching a high-spirited production of “Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp,” when a shaken man walks out on stage. “The President has been shot at Ford’s Theater!” the man proclaims, and the child screams in agony.