Lincoln

To say that a film is reverent in its portrayal of a historical character is usually a criticism.  Stephen Spielberg’s great film Lincoln (2012) is reverent in its treatment of the nation’s 16^th president.  But its reverence is embedded in a relatively careful and accurate portrayal of Lincoln’s character and times, specifically in its depiction of his interactions with his family and with members of the House of Representatives as he campaigns for passage of the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery in the United States.

Lincoln is the great national hero.  One can find other great figures from our history worthy of regard, but Lincoln stands above all.  As a film Lincoln does what every other portrayal of Lincoln has attempted—to give a realistic, compelling portrayal of the man.  No representation of a historic figure such as Lincoln can be wholly or mostly accurate.  Who knows what the man was really like?  We have no recordings of his voice, no video records, only written descriptions of him, opinions, his writings, accounts of what he said and did.  Spielberg’s film, and Daniel Day Lewis’s portrayal of the title character, takes to heart descriptions of Lincoln’s voice as high-pitched.  Such a voice runs counter to what we typically expect of our heroes—we need them to speak in booming basso profundo.  But Spielberg’s and Lewis’ Lincoln is absolutely believable.  Cinematic and speculative portrayal though he may be, this Lincoln is the One. 

It is not so much what Lincoln actually was, what he actually believed and said, how he behaved.  It is what we project through him about ourselves and our nation.  Lincoln incorporates our own views of the ideals and virtues that animate the nation, at least the nation as we’d like it to be.  Spielberg and Lewis give us that Lincoln.

Spielberg at least twice in the film uses indirection to present several of the most famous events of Lincoln’s life.  One of these is the Gettysburg Address, which Lincoln gives more than two years before the time span of the film (January to April 1865).  We experience it through Union solders who recite the speech back to Lincoln while he’s visiting a battlefield.  Another such incident is the assassination.  Rather than dramatizing it directly, Spielberg shows us another theatre, where an opera is playing, attended by the young Lincoln son Tad.  A stage manager runs on stage to announce that the president has been shot, and we experience the announcement and its meaning through the reaction on the boy’s face, and through the reactions of the people in the audience.

As radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, Tommy Lee Jones is excellent as one of the film’s two best supporting actors.  I could never quite grow comfortable with him in the role, but his cranky version of the aging senator who was a master at invective and insult and who throughout his life was an ardent supporter of rights for American blacks—and who regarded Lincoln as too cautious and conservative—is very fine.  Sally Fields, as the depressive, sometimes histrionic Mary Todd, is good as well.  Her Mary Todd Lincoln understands how the public views her, and sometimes believes her husband feels that way as well.  On occasion she is completely irrational.  Despite her apparent illness and ill manners (she lambasts Stevens at a White House party for daring to investigate her spending habits), despite her excessive worry about the oldest son Robert’ desire to enlist in the Union Army, the film shows her as a devoted supporter of her husband, especially of his desire to pass the 13^th Amendment, which will, if passed, she believes justify placing her son at risk.

Spielberg gives us a Lincoln with blemishes.  He yells at his wife in one scene, slaps his son after an insulting remark in another, is willing to offer federal appointments to House members in return for their votes.  He is so fast to tell homespun tales during tense moments that sometimes the irritation on the faces of the people around him is clear.  But overriding these negatives is the figure of the man who believed in the nation, in the Union, in freedom for the slaves, who took upon himself the weight and suffering of the thousands who died in the Civil War, North and South, fighting for what they believed.  This is the Nation’s Lincoln, the man of national legend and myth, however true or not he may be, and this is the Lincoln at the heart of Spielberg’s film.  In our own time of crisis, when everything seems in danger of tumbling down, this is a compelling figure indeed.

Big Bad Love

A moody tone piece about a man mired in despair and alcohol over his failure as a writer, a husband, a father, and a friend, Big Bad Love is full of misery. Filmed in the purlieus of Oxford and Mt. Holly, Mississippi, it shows us the South through dirt roads, rundown gas stations, bars, crazy behavior, and eccentric characters.  Its main character, Leon, is drunk through much of the film, and so depressed that he can’t distinguish his own fantasies from reality. Ostensibly he is struggling to succeed as a writer, and we often watch him opening returned manuscript and reading rejection letters, which he posts on a bulletin board over the desk where he writes on his old manual typewriter.  He’s a lover of language and of writing.  He reads the dictionary, remembers strange words, mounts words on the wall above his writing desk.  He declaims poems aloud, when he’s sober enough to remember them.  He does write, some, but mostly he drinks and gets into trouble.

Big Bad Love gives us the South of Mississippi writer Larry Brown, whose 1990 story collection of the same title is its source.  The film is based mainly on the third section of that collection, a long story entitled “92 Days,” about an unpublished and struggling writer confronting the same problems Leon in the movie deals with.  Brown’s stories in Big Bad Love are mainly about working class alcoholic men in their 30s on the verge of divorce, or recently divorced.  They’re lonely for love after deserting, or being deserted by, aging and incentive wives.  They’re like country music songs of a certain type—the George Jones type—that visit and revisit the same self-pitying and self-destructive themes from different angles over and over and over.  The film is loosely faithful to the story, but considerably less woman-hating.  My guess is that there is much of Brown in Leon (well played by Arliss Howard). 

Leon is more a struggling man than a struggling writer, and much of the film is made up of his memories, or himself and his wife (Debra Winger) early in their failed marriage, of their children at a younger age, of his childhood and especially his mother, of his apparently dead father (played in brief appearances by Larry Brown himself).  Memories and dreams interweave with a hallucinatory reality.  The film sometimes verges on making fun of Leon’s drunkenness, and indeed a mild patina of romantic admiration for his excessive living and suffering suffuses the story.

As much as this film’s moody nostalgia (for what?) entranced, it did seem to be working the old cliché that you have to suffer to succeed as a writer, and you also have to make people around you suffer and nearly drink yourself to death and wreak havoc in many other ways.  Everything that could go wrong does.  His daughter dies, his ex-wife reminds him about her restraining order, and he discovers that the brain injury his brother suffered while they were out together on a drunken spree left him nearly a vegetable. He spends two weeks in prison, but when his first story is accepted, and his novel is solicited with the promise of publication, everything turns rosy.  This change seemed too easy.

All the actors, especially Arliss Howard, Debra Winger, Rosanna Arquette, and even Angie Dickinson are good.  My old teacher and friend Coleman Barks was moving and darkly funny as the preacher who gives the eulogy at the funeral.  The soundtrack, a collection of Mississippi blues and John Hiatt and Tom Waits and others, is finely tuned to the film.

 

Good-bye, My Lady

Good-bye, My Lady (dir. William A. Weltman, 1956) follows up on the formula of The Yearling (1946)—a boy moving towards adolescence bonds with an unusual pet, in this case a dog, a rare African Basenji that laughs, weeps, cleans itself like a cat, and hunts with unusual skill.  This film lacks the lyricism and subtlety of The Yearling.  It announces its themes ahead of time, through a deep-voiced singer announcing through song that it’s sad and hard when a boy grows up to be a man--with a harmonica wistfully making wistful music in the background.  (Both the man’s voice and the song are, for lack of a better word, creepy).  The twelve-year-old Skeeter (Brandon deWilde) and his Uncle Jesse Jackson (Walter Brennan) are the primary characters. I liked Brennan in Swamp Water (1941), but here he plays a bumbling, fairly inept, lazy, but kind old man we later came to know as Gramps in the TV series “The Real McCoys.”  One scene in particular is worth the entire film—Brennan’s character stopping and starting, trying to decide what to do, his feet dancing this way and that, as if he’s deep into some sort of country jig, except that he’s just supposed to be bumbling around in a comical way.  We typically see him dozing on the front porch of his shack when he is supposed to be cutting firewood.  His major virtue is his love for his nephew, entrusted to his care after his mother’s death.  (The father is nowhere to be seen, and Uncle Jesse refuses to talk about him, as if to suggest he was some sort of scoundrel who deserted mother and child).

The film purports to show us what life in the Southern backwoods swamps was like for people in the mid-20^th century and earlier.  Skeeter and his uncle live in a ramshackle one-room shack, deep in the woods at the end of a long dirt road.  They eke out an existence selling firewood, mainly to their friend Cash Evans, who owns a store in the nearby town and is something of a friend and rival to Uncle Jesse.  Jesse is illiterate, though the boy is learning to read.  In fact, the stylized depictions of the cabin and its inhabitants probably have a limited basis in reality.  Poverty and good-heartedness are the main qualities of the poor in this film, while the more affluent Cash lives in town (Phil Harris plays this role in a peculiarly loud and wooden way).

Suffice it to state that the film revolves around how Skeeter finds the Basenji dog, names it Lady, loves it and trains it to hunt, and then gives it up when Cash shows him a newspaper ad placed by the owner, looking for the lost dog.  Skeeter decides he must give up Lady, and this is supposed to mark his coming manhood, his recognition that he must give up the dog that isn’t his.  Unfortunately, this message, fairly blunt to begin with, is blunted even more when Skeeter takes great pleasure in $100 reward money the dog’s owner gives him.  The loss of the dog hardly seems to matter.

The boy and his uncle are friends with a kind, hardworking black man who lives nearby, Gates, played by Sidney Poitier.  His wife is played by Louise Beavers, who starred for two years in the first TV show centered on black characters. It aired in the early1950s.  Gates and his wife are good-hearted, hard-working, extremely blessed with progeny.  Although both Gates and his wife are portrayed in a positive way, the film can’t quite escape the stereotype of the wise and kindhearted black folks who give advice to the whites.

The film makes a few jokes, mainly through Uncle Jesse, about the character of Yankees.  He tells a tale about how after a visiting Yankee got snake-bit the snake died.  The kindness of the man sent by the dog’s owner convinces Jesse and his nephew that all Yankees might not be so bad after all.

A few scenes of Good-bye, My Lady seem to have been shot on location, but most of the film looks like it was shot on a set, in black and white, on a small budget.

If this film aspired to be another The Yearling, it didn’t succeed.